Revealed: the towns where prices rose most and sales fell hardest

Research by ValuQ: we analysed 3,027,859 residential sales recorded by HM Land Registry in England and Wales, comparing the two years to 31 March 2019 with the two years to 31 March 2025, across all 305 local authority areas whose boundaries can be compared over that period.

What did ValuQ find?

The housing market has become more valuable and less active at the same time. In the two years to March 2019, England and Wales recorded an average of 807,388 sales a year at an average price of £296,530. In the two years to March 2025, that fell to 706,542 sales a year at an average price of £372,714.

That is 100,846 fewer homes changing hands every year, alongside a 25.7% rise in the average price. The two moved in opposite directions in 271 of the 305 areas we measured.

The part nobody has pointed out is how neatly the two line up. Sort every area by how much its prices rose, and the areas with the biggest gains are the ones that lost the most sales.

A rising market is usually assumed to be a busy one. Over this period the opposite held. Liquidity is the term for how readily a home can be turned into cash at a fair price, and on that measure the areas that gained the most value gave up the most liquidity.

Which areas lost the most sales?

Fifteen areas lost more than a quarter of their annual sales. Every one of them saw its average price rise over the same period.

Is there an area like this in every region?

Yes. No region escaped it. The scale differs, and the North East came closest to holding steady, but every region of England and every part of Wales has an area where homes got more valuable and fewer of them sold.

Why do rising prices and falling sales go together?

Our data shows the pattern rather than the cause. Three documented pressures point the same way, and each bites harder where prices have run furthest ahead.

• Borrowing costs more than it did. The Bank of England base rate stood at 3.75% at the end of July 2026, against 0.75% in mid-2019, and lenders have been raising mortgage rates in recent weeks. A bigger price needs a bigger loan, and a bigger loan at a higher rate rules more buyers out.
• Moving costs more up front. Since 1 April 2025 home movers pay stamp duty above £125,000 rather than £250,000, and first-time buyers above £300,000 rather than £425,000. Where prices have risen fastest, more homes have crossed those lines.
• Sales take far longer to finish. Rightmove reported on 31 July 2026 that the average move in Great Britain now takes 216 days from listing to completion, the longest at this point in the year since its records began in 2012. Slower moves mean fewer completed sales in any given year.

Put together, these leave a market where the homes that did sell sold for more, and fewer people were able to move at all.

A price rise you cannot act on is a number on a page. What decides whether it is real is how many buyers are still standing when you come to sell.

What does this mean for your own home?

If you own in one of these areas, two things are true at once. Your home is almost certainly worth more than it was before the pandemic, and there are fewer buyers moving each year than there were then.

That gap is where sellers get caught out. A price that made sense in a busier market can sit untouched in a thinner one, and the longer a home sits, the harder it becomes to sell at any price. Three things follow from the data.

• Last year's local sold prices are a weaker guide than they used to be. Fewer sales means fewer comparable homes, and the ones that did sell were the ones that sold.
• Getting the asking price right at the start matters more when the pool of buyers is smaller. There is less traffic to correct an over-optimistic figure.
• More than one opinion is worth having. Where a market has thinned, agents can read the same street very differently, and the gap between their valuations is information.

ValuQ gives UK homeowners free, side-by-side property valuations from competing local estate agents, so you can see how several local agents price your home before you speak to any of them. It is free for homeowners, always.

What does this mean for buyers?

Fewer sales cuts both ways. In the areas above there is less choice than there was in 2019, but there is also less competition for each home, and a seller whose property has been listed for months has a reason to talk.

The areas that held their sales volumes tend to be the ones where prices rose least. Inner London is the clearest case. In Kensington and Chelsea the average price fell 2.5% while sales rose 26%, and Hammersmith and Fulham, Camden and Lambeth all recorded small price rises alongside more homes sold than before the pandemic.

How we did this

ValuQ analysed 3,027,859 standard price paid transactions recorded by HM Land Registry in England and Wales, taken from the Price Paid Data linked-data service on 1 August 2026. We compared two complete two-year windows: 1 April 2017 to 31 March 2019, and 1 April 2023 to 31 March 2025. Both windows are old enough to be fully registered, which avoids the reporting lag that affects recent months.

We counted sales and average prices for every local authority area, then excluded the 12 authorities created by local government reorganisation after 2019, because their earlier figures cannot be compared like for like. That leaves 305 areas.

Standard price paid transactions cover sales at full market value and exclude repossessions and bulk transfers. Average price is the mean sale price of every home sold in the window, so it reflects the mix of homes that changed hands as well as their value.

Evren Ergin, founder of ValuQ, said:

Everyone has been reading the price line and calling it the market. The number that has actually changed is how many people can move. A home is worth what someone will pay for it, and in a lot of these towns there are simply fewer people in the room than there were six years ago. That is the thing a seller needs to know before they pick a price.

Common questions about this research

This is part of ValuQ Property Watch, our weekly research series built on our own analysis of public property data.