{"id":691008,"date":"2026-01-12T12:04:17","date_gmt":"2026-01-12T12:04:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/691008\/"},"modified":"2026-01-12T12:04:17","modified_gmt":"2026-01-12T12:04:17","slug":"london-property-sellers-more-likely-to-sell-at-a-loss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/691008\/","title":{"rendered":"London property sellers more likely to sell at a loss"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>That regional picture has shifted. The North East\u2019s share of sales in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mpamag.com\/uk\/glossary\/negative-equity\/559371\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">negative equity<\/a> has dropped by more than half over the past decade, from 29.9% in 2019 to 17.7% in 2024 and 13.9% in 2025. London has moved in the opposite direction, underscoring a reversal in relative performance between North and South.<\/p>\n<p>The capital\u2019s trend has been driven by flats. Although flats made up 60% of London transactions in 2025, they accounted for 90% of homes sold at a loss, up from 78.4% in 2019. At local authority level, eight of the 10 areas with the highest share of loss-making sales were in London.<\/p>\n<p>Tower Hamlets recorded the largest proportion of loss-making vendors nationally in 2025, with 28.2% of sellers achieving less than they originally paid. Flats represent more than nine in 10 sales in the borough. The City of London (26.2%), Kensington &amp; Chelsea (22.4%), Westminster (22.1%) and Hammersmith &amp; Fulham (20.8%) completed the top five local authorities where more than a fifth of sellers sold at a loss. By contrast, in Barking &amp; Dagenham, the capital\u2019s lowest-priced borough on average, only 5.3% of sellers took a loss.<\/p>\n<p>Despite the rising incidence of loss-making sales, most London vendors still achieved substantial nominal gains. The average seller in the capital in 2025 realised \u00a3172,510 more than they paid, equivalent to a 44.6% increase. Much of this uplift reflects <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mpamag.com\/uk\/mortgage-types\/residential\/house-prices-to-rise-80000-over-five-years-savills\/555535\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">longer-term price growth<\/a> rather than recent performance. Around half of London households who sold last year had owned their property for more than 10 years; in cash terms, these long-term owners accounted for 77% of total gains in the capital.<\/p>\n<p>Houses outperformed flats. London house sellers achieved an average gain of 59.6% over a typical holding period of 10.3 years, compared with 35.4% for flat owners over an average of 10.1 years. Only 3.5% of house vendors in the capital sold at a loss, versus 22.2% of flat sellers. That gap has widened, making it harder for flat owners to step up to a house.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"That regional picture has shifted. The North East\u2019s share of sales in negative equity has dropped by more&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":691009,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7757],"tags":[748,393,4884,257,3116,2516,16,15],"class_list":["post-691008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-london","tag-britain","tag-england","tag-great-britain","tag-london","tag-loss","tag-property","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115882037343462361","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=691008"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691008\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/691009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=691008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=691008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=691008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}