Family homes lost value in 53 areas last year. None were northern.

Research by ValuQ: we analysed 1,325,799 second-hand house sales registered with HM Land Registry across England and Wales during 2024 and 2025, then compared the median sale price in every local authority with at least 400 sales in both years.

Where did family homes lose value last year?

The national picture looks calm. The median second-hand house in England and Wales sold for £281,000 in 2024 and £290,000 in 2025, a rise of 3.2%. That single number hides a market that pulled in two directions.

In 53 local authorities the typical family home changed hands for less money in 2025 than in 2024. These are not marginal places. They include Winchester, Cambridge, Oxford, Brighton and Hove, St Albans and nine London boroughs, alongside the countryside and coastal districts that were the most sought-after addresses of the past five years.

Why is the North missing from the list?

This is the part of the data that stopped us. We analysed 62 local authorities across the North East, the North West, Yorkshire and Cumbria. In every single one, the median second-hand family home was worth more at the end of 2025 than at the start of 2024.

The strongest rises were all northern. County Durham led England and Wales at +13.4%, taking the median second-hand house from £108,500 to £123,000. South Ribble rose 10.3%, Middlesbrough 10.0%, Oldham 9.3% and North Tyneside 9.3%.

Two forces explain most of this. Affordability is one: with the average two-year fixed mortgage rate at 5.07% in June 2026, according to Rightmove, buyers are being pushed toward markets where a family home costs three times the local wage rather than eight. The second force is the unwinding of the move-out years. Coastal and rural districts carry a high share of second homes and holiday lets, and demand from buyers who do not have to move is the first demand to disappear.

A national average is a poor guide to your own street. Last year the same market that lifted a family home in County Durham by 13% took £22,000 off one in Winchester. If you are deciding whether to sell, the number that matters is the one attached to your address, not the one in the headline.

That is Evren Ergin, founder of ValuQ.

What does this mean for my own home?

It means the headline number you have been reading is probably not your number. A national index is an average of hundreds of local markets that are currently moving in opposite directions.

• If your home is in one of the 53 areas, the price your neighbour achieved in early 2024 may now be above what the market will pay.
• If your home is in the North, the opposite risk applies. A valuation anchored to what the house was worth two years ago may be leaving money on the table.
• Median means the middle sale. Half of homes sold for more and half for less, so your own street can move differently from your local authority.
• A sold price is a record of what a home was worth on the day it sold. It is not a valuation of what yours is worth today.

What should sellers do about it?

1. Get more than one valuation. In a market moving this unevenly, a single opinion is a single data point.
2. Ask each agent to show you the comparable sales behind their number, with the dates. A comparable from early 2024 is a different market from one in late 2025.
3. Treat the highest number with the most care. The agent who values highest is not always the agent who sells fastest, and an overpriced home that sits on the market is the expensive outcome.
4. If you are in one of the falling areas, price to the current evidence rather than to the peak. Homes that launch at the right number are the ones that hold their price through to completion.

What does it mean for buyers?

• In the 53 falling areas, asking prices set months ago may sit above what the data supports, which is a case for negotiating from evidence.
• In the northern markets that rose fastest, waiting has had a cost. County Durham's median rose £14,500 in a single year.
• Check the sold prices on the actual street, not the town. The gap between the two is where most negotiating room lives.

How we did this

ValuQ analysed HM Land Registry Price Paid Data for every residential sale registered in England and Wales during 2024 and 2025, downloaded on 18 July 2026. We kept detached, semi-detached and terraced houses, and excluded flats, new-build homes, sales under £20,000 or above £5,000,000, and deleted records.

New builds were excluded deliberately. They register with HM Land Registry considerably later than second-hand homes, so leaving them in would have made recent months look artificially cheap and produced falls that are an artefact of the data rather than the market. Removing them leaves a like-for-like comparison of second-hand homes. We then took the median sale price per local authority per year, and kept the 312 local authorities with at least 400 qualifying sales in both years. Median changes in the smallest areas rest on fewer sales, so the sale counts sit alongside every figure in our full dataset.

This is ValuQ Property Watch, our weekly research series on what the sold-price data shows about the UK housing market. ValuQ gives UK homeowners free, side-by-side property valuations from competing local estate agents.