The UK’s fastest and slowest house sales markets revealed

Latest data shows house sale transactions are taking an average of 122.50 days to complete across England, Wales and Scotland over the last year. And some of the quickest areas to sell a property at the moment include Maesteg in South Wales (CF34), Kirkcaldy in Scotland (KY2) and Immingham in Lincolnshire (DN40).

Professional house buying firm Property Solvers’ speed of sale tool has revealed that it’s taking an average of 17.50 weeks to sell a property across England, Wales and Scotland.

Updated monthly, the latest dataset analysed over 97,814 property sales across the region between February 2023 and February 2024.

OFFICIALLY SOLD

The statistics track the moment a property is listed on a range of different property portals to the point it’s marked as officially ‘sold’ at the HM Land Registry.

As shown in the table below, properties were selling the fastest in Maesteg (CF34), Kirkcaldy (KY2) and Immingham (DN40) adopting a minimum number of 35 property sales in a given area.  In the top 10 areas, Property Solvers revealed that homes took 96.10 days (13.73 weeks) to sell on average.

Homes were selling the slowest in the Royston (SG8), Bolton (BL7) and Neston (CH64) postcodes (also sampling a minimum data set of 35 property sales).  In the bottom 10 postcodes, the data showed that properties were taking 147.00 days (21.00 weeks) to sell on average.

Ruban Selvanayagam of Property Solvers says: “whilst we’re starting to see some noticeable improvements into 2024, the continued pressures on the mortgage sector and buyers’ ability to secure the right kind of finance has resulted in delays with sales completing,”

And the Co-founder of the sell house fast company adds: “Combined with the recognised ‘snail pace’ nature of the conveyancing process, it’s likely that these trends are likely to remain for some time.”