Selling a home now takes 216 days: a record wait

What did Rightmove actually find?

Rightmove published new analysis on 31 July 2026 measuring the whole length of a home move across Great Britain, not just the marketing period. The average seller now waits 216 days, a little over seven months, between the day the home goes on the market and the day the sale completes.

The number is the longest recorded at this point in the year since Rightmove began tracking it. Completion times have stretched by 36 days since 2019. Rightmove counted £205 billion of residential property on its platform waiting to complete.

Why does completing take longer than finding a buyer?

Finding a buyer is the part sellers watch. Completing is the part nobody watches, and it is where the time now goes. Four things stretch it.

• Local authority searches. The government target is a maximum of 10 working days, but the slowest councils were taking 25 to 45 working days according to the HomeOwners Alliance guide updated for 2026. There is no penalty for a council that misses the target.
• Legal enquiries. Every question the buyer's solicitor raises has to travel to your solicitor, then to you, then back again. Each round trip is measured in days, not hours.
• The mortgage. A lender's valuation, underwriting and formal offer sit on their own timetable, and any change in the buyer's circumstances restarts part of it.
• The chain. Your completion date is set by the slowest transaction in the chain, not by yours.

Does where you live change the wait?

It changes it a great deal. Scotland's different conveyancing system, where much of the legal work happens before a sale is concluded, produces a completion stage roughly a third shorter than London's.

Is the market itself slowing as well?

Yes, on the activity side. Zoopla's House Price Index published on 30 July 2026 put annual house price inflation at 1.3%, with the average UK home at £272,800, up £3,400 over the year. Prices are still rising. Activity is not.

• Sales agreed in the four weeks to 19 July 2026 were 9% lower than the same period a year earlier, Zoopla's weakest reading of 2026.
• The number of homes available for sale rose year on year in 8 of the UK's 11 regions, so buyers have more to choose from.
• Zoopla's Richard Donnell described it as a sharper slowdown than usual for the summer.

More competing sellers and fewer agreed sales does not mean your home will not sell. It means the buyer you get is worth protecting, because replacing them takes another 62 days on the current average.

What does a 154-day wait do to your buyer's mortgage offer?

A mortgage offer is the lender's formal, binding commitment to lend a set amount on a set property, and it expires. MoneyHelper states a full mortgage offer is usually valid for six months, and shorter windows of around three months exist with some lenders.

One hundred and fifty-four days is a little over five months. On the national average, a standard six-month offer now completes with weeks to spare rather than months, and a three-month offer expires before completion. Ask your agent early what date your buyer's offer runs to, and treat that date as the real deadline for the sale.

Finding a buyer is the part everyone watches. Completing is the part that now takes two and a half times as long.

What can a seller actually control here?

Most of the 154 days sits with solicitors, councils and lenders. A short list of things genuinely sits with you, and they are worth doing on day one rather than week six.

• Instruct your solicitor as soon as the sale is agreed, and complete the property forms the same week. Paperwork sitting in your kitchen drawer is pure added delay.
• Gather the documents a buyer's solicitor always asks for before they ask: building regulations certificates, guarantees, planning permissions, the EPC, and any lease or management pack if the home is leasehold.
• Ask your agent for a written update on the chain every fortnight, and ask specifically what stage each buyer's mortgage is at rather than whether things are fine.
• Find out your buyer's mortgage offer expiry date, and diarise it.
• Answer enquiries in one batch rather than in dribs and drabs. Each round trip costs days.

What does this mean when you are choosing an agent?

A 216-day average makes the quality of the agent's chain management worth as much as the valuation figure they quote. When you compare agents, ask each one how they chase a stalled conveyancer, how often they update sellers, and what their own average time from sale agreed to completion looks like.

ValuQ gives UK homeowners free, side-by-side property valuations from competing local estate agents, so you can weigh those answers next to the numbers before you commit to anyone. The timeline belongs to you. Knowing the real one is how you keep hold of it.