One in six recently bought homes now resells at a loss

Research by ValuQ: we matched every England and Wales home sale in HM Land Registry's Price Paid Data to the previous sale of the same address, then measured how often homes resold within five years went for less than the owner paid.

ValuQ Property Watch, 3 October 2026.

Why does a 16.3% loss rate matter this week?

Nationwide reported on 1 October that annual house price growth halved to 0.8% in September, with East Anglia the weakest region at -0.7%. The Bank of England said on 29 September that mortgage approvals for house purchase fell to 54,900 in August, the fewest since December 2023, while the average rate on newly drawn mortgages rose to 4.60%.

Those headlines describe an average. Underneath it, the owners who bought in the last few years and now need to move are meeting a market that has stopped paying what it did in 2022. A cash loss, in this research, is a sale at a lower price than the seller paid, before selling costs and before any money spent on the home.

How far has the share of recent buyers selling at a loss climbed?

In the first half of 2026, 7,093 of the 43,408 homes that resold within five years of purchase sold for less than the owner paid. That is 16.3%. The last time the rate was higher was the first half of 2013, at 26.8%.

The rise is not a rounding effect. Sales at a loss of more than 10% of the purchase price were 4.2% of these resales in 2026, against 2.4% in 2024. Restricting the test to homes that were not bought new, the 2026 rate is 15.3%, against 8.8% in 2024.

Which homes and which buyers are losing money?

Flats are the exposed end of the market. Close to three in ten flats resold within five years went for less than the owner paid, and the buyers of 2022 and 2023 account for most of the pain.

Across all 7,093 losing sales the combined shortfall was about £210 million, and the median loss was £15,000, or 5.1% of the price paid. Selling costs sit on top of that.

Which parts of England and Wales are worst hit?

The map of losses is not the map of the headline index. In the 12 months to June 2026, 14.0% of homes resold within five years sold below the purchase price across England and Wales, but the rate runs from 27.1% in Suffolk to 6.2% in Greater Manchester.

At council level, 132 areas had at least 300 qualifying resales. The highest rates are on the south and east coasts and in East Anglia, and three Essex councils sit in the top 16.

How did ValuQ do this research?

How we did this: ValuQ took the HM Land Registry Price Paid Data file released in August 2026, which holds every residential sale in England and Wales completed from 1995 to 31 July 2026. We kept ordinary market sales of houses and flats (category A), matched each sale to the previous sale of the same address (postcode, house number or name, flat number and street), and kept pairs of the same property type at least one year apart with a price ratio between 0.2 and 5.

That gave 12.6 million resale pairs. This article uses the 43,408 pairs where the second sale completed between 1 January and 30 June 2026 and the first sale was less than five years earlier, and the same cut for every earlier year. We stopped at 30 June because the newest registrations were still arriving when the file was cut.

A sale is counted as a loss when the second price is lower than the first in cash terms. We did not adjust for inflation, selling costs, stamp duty paid on the way in or money spent on the home.

The headline index says prices are flat, and flat hides a lot. Underneath it, one in six owners who bought within the last five years and have had to move are selling for less than they paid. An average cannot tell you which side of that line your home is on. The sold prices on your own street can.

Evren Ergin, founder of ValuQ

What does this mean if you own a home?

If you bought between 2021 and 2024 and are thinking of moving, the town average is the wrong number to plan around. What matters is what homes like yours, on streets like yours, have actually sold for since you bought. A loss on paper is not a loss until you sell, so the decision is worth making with evidence.

Start with three numbers: what you paid, what your mortgage balance is, and what comparable homes nearby have sold for in the last 12 months. Then get more than one professional opinion, because estate agents read the same market differently. ValuQ gives UK homeowners free, side-by-side property valuations from competing local estate agents, and the homeowner stays anonymous until they choose to connect with one.

What does it mean if you are buying?

A seller's purchase price is not a guide to what a home is worth, and a seller who is up on paper can behave very differently from one who is down. Use recent sold prices on the street, and ask how long a home has been on the market and whether it has been reduced. In the coastal and East Anglian council areas above, recent sales are where the evidence is.

What are the limits of this analysis?

• It covers England and Wales only, because HM Land Registry data does not include Scotland or Northern Ireland.
• It only includes homes with an earlier recorded sale since 1995, so it describes resales, not every sale.
• Prices are nominal and exclude selling costs, so the true loss rate after costs is higher than the figures shown.
• County and council figures rest on a few hundred sales each, so a gap of a few percentage points between neighbours is not a ranking you should rely on.
• The county is the postal county in the Land Registry record, so Southend-on-Sea and Thurrock are not in the Essex row.

Frequently asked questions