BLOGS

A market awash with stock — but short on buyers

The UK residential sales market has rarely looked like this. The number of homes listed for sale has climbed to levels not seen since the aftermath of the global financial crisis, with industry sources including Rightmove and Zoopla reporting available stock at multi-year highs across England, Scotland and Wales. Yet the volume of agreed sales has simultaneously dropped: major portals and RICS surveys point to a 7–9% year-on-year decline in agreed transactions in the most recent rolling period, a gap that cannot be explained by seasonal patterns alone.

REalyse data on active sales listings currently shows over 795,000 properties on the market across the UK — a figure that underscores just how much stock has accumulated. The average property is sitting on the market for nearly 57 days nationally before finding a buyer, but the picture varies dramatically by region and by the price point at which stamp duty thresholds now apply.

This disconnect between listing volume and transactional momentum has sharpened a question that local authorities, developers and housing analysts have been quietly debating for months: if buyers are stepping back even in a market supposedly desperate for more homes, what does that mean for the planning pipeline that is meant to deliver them?

Southern England: where the listing surge is sharpest

The geographic concentration of unsold stock is striking. REalyse data reveals that the highest listing volumes in the country are heavily clustered across southern English postcode areas, with the South West London (SW) area leading nationally at over 20,000 active listings — carrying an average asking price of approximately £1.63 million and an average days-on-market figure of 63 days. South East London (SE) is not far behind with more than 15,200 listings at an average of £1.17 million and an equally sluggish 63 days on market.

Outside the capital, coastal and commuter-belt areas in the South are carrying exceptional levels of unsold stock. Brighton and Hove (BN) holds more than 15,300 active listings, while Kent's TN postcode area — covering Royal Tunbridge Wells and surrounding towns — sits at nearly 15,000. Bournemouth and Poole (BH), the Exeter and Devon area (EX), Portsmouth (PO) and Guildford and Surrey (GU) each carry between 10,900 and 13,500 listings, with days on market running 50–61 days.

The contrast with comparable northern and Midlands markets is notable. Nottingham (NG), for instance, is carrying around 14,200 active listings but properties are clearing in under 48 days on average at asking prices around £322,000. Leeds (LS) averages just 47 days on market. The implication is clear: southern England is accumulating stock because buyer demand, relative to supply, is deteriorating faster — and the April 2025 stamp duty threshold changes, which disproportionately affected higher-priced southern markets, have accelerated that process.

When the nil-rate stamp duty threshold for standard purchasers reverted from £250,000 to £125,000 in April 2025, and the first-time buyer relief ceiling dropped from £425,000 to £300,000, it was southern England — where even modest homes frequently breach the £300,000 mark — that bore the brunt. Land Registry transaction data tracked by REalyse shows a pronounced spike in completions in March 2025 as buyers rushed to beat the deadline, followed by a sharp contraction in April that has only partially recovered in subsequent months.

Planning pipelines under the spotlight

The market dynamics described above are arriving at an awkward moment for planning policy. The updated National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), published in December 2024, reinstated mandatory housing targets for local planning authorities in England after years of advisory flexibility, and restated the government's ambition to deliver 1.5 million new homes over the course of this parliament. The standard method for calculating local housing need has been recalibrated to direct a larger share of new homes to London and the South East — precisely the areas where market absorption is now most under pressure.

The tension this creates is acute. Many of the local authority areas showing the largest accumulation of unsold existing stock — coastal Kent, East Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire and outer London boroughs — are also the areas where planning inspectors and the Planning Inspectorate have been pressing for accelerated housing delivery. Yet developers and housebuilders arguing for planning consent in these locations now face a market context in which comparable new-build stock is sitting unsold for extended periods.

REalyse planning pipeline data provides a useful lens here. In southern commuter-belt districts, the proportion of homes with planning consent that have not yet started on site has been rising, while viability assessments are increasingly sensitive to the gap between projected sales values and current market clearing prices. New-build stock represents roughly 43–44% of active listings in several key southern postcode areas — including Southampton, Brighton, Guildford and Bournemouth — compared with a national active listing share of around 41%, suggesting that new-build pipeline is flowing onto the market even as the pace of absorption is softening.

The five-year housing land supply test, which determines whether councils can resist speculative development proposals, is coming under renewed scrutiny. Authorities that cannot demonstrate a deliverable five-year supply lose their ability to apply their development plan policies, triggering the "presumption in favour of sustainable development." Several southern local planning authorities have already been caught by this mechanism, but critics argue that forcing more permissions into markets where buyer demand is retreating may accelerate the very viability pressures that slow delivery.

What slowing transactions mean for housing targets and delivery

The mismatch between supply and transactions matters for housing delivery in ways that go beyond developer sentiment. When agreed sales slow and days on market lengthen, the cascade effects reach build-out rates on large sites. Housebuilders are volume-sensitive businesses: most major developers have historically sold between 0.3 and 0.7 units per outlet per week on private open-market sales, and that rate is directly affected by the volume of buyers in the market. A 7–9% decline in agreed transactions — if sustained — translates reasonably directly into slower build-out, longer exposure periods for infrastructure costs, and reduced incentive to open new phases.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) and MHCLG housing supply data have consistently shown a gap between permissions granted and homes completed. In 2023/24, England delivered approximately 234,000 net additions — well below the 300,000 annual target that preceded the current government's even more ambitious 370,000-home-per-year aspiration. Southern England, which accounts for a disproportionate share of the permissions pipeline, also accounts for a disproportionate share of the shortfall between consent and completion.

For local authorities, the current market creates a genuine strategic dilemma. Granting more permissions to meet housing targets in a market where buyer activity is declining does not by itself accelerate delivery; it may simply extend the pipeline of uncommenced consents. REalyse data on planning applications and site-level comparable values allows investors, developers and planners to interrogate where genuine viability exists — and where projected sales values, benchmarked against actual achieved prices per square foot in the surrounding market, no longer support the assumed GDV at the time of application.

Outlook: pressure points and what to watch

The fundamental question facing the UK housing market in the second half of 2025 and into 2026 is whether buyer demand can recover sufficiently to absorb the accumulated stock — or whether listing volumes will remain elevated long enough to trigger price correction in the most exposed areas.

Southern England faces the sharpest near-term risk. With over 20,000 active listings in the SW postcode area alone and properties sitting on market for more than 63 days on average, the margin for further demand deterioration is thin. If mortgage rates remain sticky above 4.5% — and the Bank of England's path to cuts remains gradual — the pressure on southern markets at the £400,000–£800,000 price point could intensify through the autumn.

For planning policy, the data suggests that housing targets set at the national level need to be stress-tested against local market absorption capacity. Granting permissions in markets where buyers are already in retreat may produce a pipeline of unviable or stalled schemes rather than a genuine increase in completions. REalyse's combination of live listing and transaction data, planning application tracking and comparable valuation tools gives developers, lenders and local authorities the analytical foundation to navigate this environment — identifying where genuine demand exists, where the viability gap is widening, and where the gap between pipeline and delivery is likely to grow rather than close.