78 towns where recent buyers sell at a loss more often than London

Research by ValuQ: we matched every home in England and Wales that appears more than once on the HM Land Registry Price Paid record, kept the 263,470 pairs where the home sold again within five years of being bought, and compared the two prices town by town.

Which towns are worst for a recent buyer who has to sell?

Stowmarket in Suffolk has the highest rate in England and Wales. Of the 292 Stowmarket homes bought and sold again inside five years, 28.4% sold for less than the owner had paid for them. The typical seller in that group was £13,500 up on paper, before the stamp duty, agent fee, legal fee and moving costs of the two moves came out of it.

London's rate over the same period was 16.3%, measured across 12,846 short-hold sales, the largest sample of any place in the country. That is a high rate. It is not the highest, and 78 towns are worse.

A short hold is a home bought and sold again within five years. Every figure below is a real sale price compared with a real earlier sale price for the same address, taken from the public land register. None of it is an estimate or a model.

Why is the loss belt on the coast rather than in the capital?

Two things decide it, and neither is about London. The first is when the owner bought. Among these sales, people who bought in 2020 sold below their purchase price 4.7% of the time, while people who bought in 2022 did so 20.9% of the time.

The 2022 buyers are the ones reaching the five-year mark now, and they bought at the top. The second thing is where they went. The pandemic years pushed a wave of movers into coastal Kent, Sussex, Devon and Cornwall and into the market towns of Suffolk and Norfolk.

Those places rose fastest and have given the most back. The towns at the bottom of the table, in Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and South Wales, never had the same spike to unwind.

• Flats are the most exposed property type. 21.0% of flats sold within five years went for less than the owner paid, against 8.0% of terraced houses.
• A home that was bought new is more exposed than one bought second hand. Where the earlier purchase was a new build, 17.9% resold below the purchase price, against 10.6% where it was not.
• Selling below the purchase price is not the whole picture. Across all 263,470 sales, 26.4% gained less than 5% over the entire time the owner held the home, which for most movers will not cover the cost of buying and selling twice.

Where did recent buyers do best?

In 28 towns, fewer than one in twenty short-hold sellers got back less than they paid. All 28 are in the North West, Yorkshire, the Midlands or South Wales. Newton-le-Willows in Merseyside recorded the lowest rate in England and Wales at 2.4%, with a median gain of 27.1%.

What does this mean if you are thinking of selling?

It means the national headline is not your number. In the same 29 months, a five-year owner in Newton-le-Willows was ten times less likely to sell below their purchase price than one in Stowmarket. Both of them read the same reports about house prices rising.

• Find out what your home is actually worth today before you decide anything. If you bought in 2021 or 2022, your position is genuinely different from someone who bought in 2019, and the gap is measured in tens of thousands.
• Work out your net figure, not your headline figure. Stamp duty on the purchase, the agent fee, both sets of legal fees and the removals bill all come out of any gain before it reaches you.
• Do not price against what your neighbour paid at the peak. In the towns at the top of this table, the last sale on the street may be well above what the same home would fetch now.
• If you are not forced to move, time is on your side. The register shows the loss rate falling sharply for owners who have held for longer than five years.

What does it mean if you are buying?

In the towns at the top of the table, some of the homes you are viewing were bought for more than they are now worth. That does not make them bad homes, and it does not mean the seller will accept less.

It does mean the asking price may be anchored to a 2022 purchase rather than to what similar homes have actually sold for since. Sold prices, not asking prices, are the honest guide.

The people selling now are mostly the people who bought in 2022, and the register shows how differently that has gone depending on where they bought. A seller in Newton-le-Willows and a seller in Stowmarket have lived through the same national headlines and are looking at completely different numbers. That is why an average is no use to anyone deciding whether to move. What matters is what your own home is worth this week. Evren Ergin, founder of ValuQ.

How did ValuQ work this out?

This is ValuQ Property Watch, the weekly research series from ValuQ, the platform that gives UK homeowners free, side-by-side property valuations from competing local estate agents.

1. We took the full HM Land Registry Price Paid record for England and Wales, 29.5 million sales from January 1995 to May 2026, downloaded on 16 July 2026 under the Open Government Licence.
2. We kept standard full-market-value sales of houses and flats only, and matched each sale to the previous sale of the same address using postcode, house number, flat number and street.
3. We kept the 263,470 pairs where the second sale completed between January 2024 and May 2026, within five years of the first sale, and at least 90 days after it. The median gap between the two sales was 3.5 years.
4. For each town with at least 150 such pairs, 443 towns in total, we calculated the share that sold for less than the earlier purchase price, and the median gain.
5. Gains are nominal. They are before inflation and before the costs of buying and selling, so the number of owners who ended up genuinely out of pocket is higher than the loss rates shown here.

Two limits are worth stating. Sales registered after May 2026 are not in this data, and a home that was extended or rebuilt between the two sales will show a gain that reflects the work rather than the market. Neither affects the ranking between towns, because both apply everywhere.