UK Premium Property Market in August 2026
In August, 8,367 homes priced above £750,000 were taken off the market without selling. In the same month, 6,781 sold.
Homes priced above £750,000
That is the fourth August in a row in which more homes at this level have been withdrawn than have found a buyer, and the gap has never been wider. It is also the clearest difference between this part of the market and the rest of it. Across the country as a whole, sellers are reducing their asking prices and staying put. Above £750,000, more of them are holding their price and then giving up on the move altogether.
Below is what the August figures show, what the year looks like eight months in, and what it means whether you are thinking of selling or buying at this level.
The number of homes coming to market was entirely ordinary. New listings were 2.21% below the 2021-2026 August average and 1.55% below last August. The fall from July looks dramatic at 21.81%, but July to August is always a steep drop and last year it was much the same. Despite what you may have read about a flood of expensive homes arriving, no such flood took place.
Demand at this level also held up better than most coverage suggested. Sales agreed came in 0.91% below the 2021-2026 average for the month. Across the market as a whole, including every price bracket, the equivalent figure was 2.91% below average. Expensive homes were not the problem in August. In a month when national sales were noticeably weak, this end of the market was closer to normal than the rest.
The difficulty is not the homes arriving or the buyers appearing. It is the volume of stock that has already built up behind them. There were 94,440 homes above £750,000 for sale in August, up 2.96% on last year and 22.99% above the 2021-2026 average. Compared with August 2021 the number has risen by 83%, while monthly sales have risen by only 4%.
Stock did fall on the month, by 5.60%, and it has now edged down for two months running. That is less encouraging than it sounds. The number of homes for sale falls when homes sell, and it falls when owners take them off the market. Sales dropped 17.19% between July and August, so this reduction did not come from the selling side.
How long the queue has become
Six in every ten homes newly listed above £750,000 in August went on to agree a sale. Last August the figure was 61.3%, and in August 2021 it was 71.2%.
Look at it from the other direction and the scale of the backlog becomes clearer. At the rate homes are currently selling, it would take almost 14 months to clear the stock now on the market, against eight months in 2021. For homes at every price level the equivalent figure is a little over seven months. Sellers above £750,000 are waiting in a queue roughly twice as long as everybody else.
One number is moving firmly in the right direction. Fall throughs, where an agreed sale collapses before completion, came in 7.57% down on last August and 10.69% below the 2021-2026 average. As a share of agreed sales that is 23.4%, the lowest August in six years. Sales at this level are still not easy to agree, but once agreed they are holding together better than they have in years, helped by the larger share of buyers here who are paying cash or borrowing modestly.
Sellers are withdrawing rather than reducing
This is the behaviour that sets the premium market apart, and it is worth understanding before you decide how to price a home this autumn.
In August, 6,096 homes above £750,000 had a price change. That is 6.45% of all the stock at this level, and it is the lowest August figure since 2021. Across the market as a whole, 11.17% of homes for sale were repriced in the same month. Owners of expensive homes are cutting their asking prices at little more than half the rate of everybody else, while taking their homes off the market at a rate nobody else comes close to.
The year to date figures make the contrast plain.
Read the bottom two lines together. Across the market as a whole, more owners are adjusting their asking price and fewer are giving up on the move. Above £750,000, fewer are adjusting and more are giving up.
The reasons are understandable. A move at this level is far more likely to be a choice than a necessity. There is usually no chain pushing from behind, no deadline to be out by, and often enough equity that waiting appears to cost nothing. When the conversation about price arrives, withdrawing is a genuine option in a way it simply is not for somebody who has to move.
It does cost something, though, and the cost is rarely visible at the time. Research by Connells found that homes which have been reduced are 27% less likely to receive an offer than homes which have not. A home launched at an ambitious figure, reduced twice and then withdrawn has not merely lost six or eight months. It has taught every active buyer in the area to wait, and that price history follows it back to the market whenever it returns.
Between January and August there were 68,053 withdrawals above £750,000 against 54,679 sales agreed. That is 1.24 homes taken off the market for every one sold. In 2021 the ratio was 0.74. The crossover happened in 2023 and the gap has widened every year since.
The shape of the year is simple enough. Around 48% more homes above £750,000 have come to market than in 2021, and slightly fewer of them have sold. Everything else follows from that.
So far in 2026, 42.3% of homes newly listed above £750,000 have gone on to agree a sale, against 45.3% last year, 44.3% in 2024 and 64.9% in 2021. For homes at every price level the figure is 60.6%. That 18 point gap explains a great deal, including why a neighbour's £500,000 house can sell inside a month while a £900,000 home three streets away sits until Christmas.
In plain terms, 129,368 homes above £750,000 have been listed this year and 54,679 have sold, leaving 74,689 that have not. The drop in the success rate is not a recent wobble. The serious fall happened in 2023 and the market has never recovered.
Why buyers cannot pay what they could a year ago
Very little of this is about appetite. Mortgage advisers carried out 19.1% more searches for homes worth £1 million or more in July than a year earlier, the strongest growth of any price band in the country. Searches for homes under £150,000 fell by nearly 9%. Interest in expensive homes is rising, not falling.
What has changed is what that interest can be turned into. Mortgage approvals nationally were 14.22% lower in July than a year earlier, the steepest fall in any measure published this month. Approvals now represent 58% of completed sales, the lowest figure outside 2023, which tells you cash is carrying more of this market than it was.
The clearest way to understand the squeeze comes from Zoopla. A buyer who could support a £200,000 mortgage in January can support roughly £182,000 today on the same monthly payment, a 9% fall in eight months. Applied to this market, somebody taking a £450,000 mortgage to buy at £750,000 with a 40% deposit has lost around £40,500 of buying power since January. They made no decision, took no pay cut and did nothing wrong. The money simply got smaller.
There is a more cheerful point buried in the mortgage figures, and it is one many buyers at this level do not realise. The average new mortgage rate quoted in the press was 5.59% at the start of August. The rate borrowers actually paid on new mortgages in July, according to the Bank of England, was 4.45%. For those borrowing at 60% of a property's value, which describes most buyers at this level, the best two year fix was 4.32% and the best five year 4.38%. The advertised average overstates the real cost of borrowing here by well over a percentage point, and the advertised average is the number that makes the headlines. Anybody who has concluded this year is unaffordable has very likely reached that conclusion using the wrong figure.
If wholesale funding costs return towards where they sat before the conflict in the Middle East, average five year fixed rates would be somewhere near 4.6% to 4.85%, restoring close to £35,000 of borrowing capacity on a £450,000 loan. That is the single largest potential change in this market, and it depends on events well outside anybody's control.
Where the pressure is greatest
Asking prices tell the same story. Rightmove put the average asking price for larger homes at the top of the market at £667,056 in August, down 2.8% on the month and 0.8% on the year. At the first time buyer end of the market the monthly fall was 0.3%. The discretionary end of the market is repricing at nine times the rate of the practical end, which is what happens when the constraint is the cost of borrowing and not the desire to move.
Property type matters too. Detached homes, which make up the bulk of the premium market outside London, saw 49.5% of listings agree a sale in July against a national figure of 54.6%. Flats did worst of all at 41.1%, and they are the only type of home in the country currently falling in value.
Equity is the part few sellers think about until it arrives. Connells found that around 32% of homes originally bought for £1 million or more are now worth less than their owner paid, against 7.5% of homes bought below £1 million. In London an estimated 21% of all homes are worth less than the price paid for them, and only 9% of London sellers this year had owned their home for less than five years, against 27% in 2006. Prime central London has now seen 39 consecutive months of falling annual values and sits around 23% below its peak in 2015.
All of those figures are describing the same problem. A market in which a third of buyers at the very top cannot sell without accepting a loss will have low turnover, fewer sales, more withdrawals and softening prices, and will keep having them until either values recover or owners stop waiting.
One more figure is worth knowing if your home sits in open countryside. Nationwide's research this month puts the premium on a home inside a National Park at 24%, worth roughly £66,500 on current average values. A home inside a National Landscape, formerly known as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, attracts 14%, around £39,000, and a home within five kilometres of a National Park attracts 6%. These are premiums over an otherwise identical property elsewhere, so they are not a figure to add to a valuation, but they are a useful reminder that a genuine location advantage holds its value when broader prices do not.
The Budget on 28th October
Three tax questions bear on this market and only one of them has been settled.
Stamp duty is not changing. The Prime Minister has ruled out reforming or abolishing it in October, and a wholesale replacement such as an annual land value tax is not being prepared. For sellers at this level that cuts both ways. It removes a reason for buyers to sit and wait, which helps immediately. It also removes the one change that would have made a real difference here, since stamp duty bills fall heaviest on expensive homes. The typical mover in England paid £5,950 in stamp duty this year. In London the typical figure is £23,000.
Aligning capital gains tax with income tax has been reported as under consideration and has not been ruled out. If that is announced, expect a rush of landlords putting property up for sale before it takes effect, much of it at the upper end and concentrated in London and the South East.
Two changes are already law. Tax rates on property income rise by two percentage points from April 2027, and an annual charge on English homes worth more than £2 million begins in April 2028. Any owner above that threshold weighing up their plans over the next two years is looking at both.
The wider effect of all this is uncertainty, and uncertainty slows the top of the market more than any other part of it, because the sums involved are largest and the move is most often optional. A proportion of the buyers currently sitting on their hands are doing so for reasons that have nothing to do with the homes they are looking at.
If you are thinking of selling
Price it correctly on the first day. Nearly 40% of homes listed above £750,000 this year have had their asking price cut, and homes that have been reduced are 27% less likely to attract an offer than those that have not. The first three or four weeks on the market attract more genuine interest than the following six months combined, and an asking price that reflects what buyers can currently borrow is the only way to make use of them.
Plan for months, not weeks. With almost 14 months of stock at this level, a realistic timescale is two or three quarters. Knowing that at the outset is what prevents a sale becoming a withdrawal in March.
Find out what your likely buyer can actually borrow. It has fallen by around £40,500 on a typical £450,000 mortgage since January. That is not a reflection of your home, your presentation or your agent, and it is the single biggest reason the market has slowed.
If you bought at the top of the market between 2015 and 2022, get a clear and honest picture of your position before you commit to anything. A third of purchases above £1 million are currently worth less than was paid for them. It is far better to know that at the start than to discover it three months into a sale.
If you are buying
Conditions have not been this favourable for buyers at this level in years. There are 94,440 homes above £750,000 on the market, roughly 23% more than the 2021-2026 average, and many sellers have now been waiting a long time. Choice is wide, competing bids are rare, and negotiating room is real.
Check the rate you would personally be offered rather than the average in the news. Buyers borrowing at 60% of a property's value were being offered rates around 4.32% to 4.38% in August, well over a percentage point below the headline figures.
Take some comfort from the fall-through data. Agreed sales at this level are collapsing less often than at any point in the past half a dozen years, so a deal agreed this autumn has a better chance of reaching completion than one agreed in 2021 did.
If you are buying above £2 million, factor in the annual charge that begins in April 2028 before you settle on a budget.
Where this leaves things
Homes in the premium market are still selling. Just under 6,800 found a buyer in August, which is close to the 2021-2026 average for the month. The market has not stopped, and anyone saying it has at this price level is describing the number of homes for sale rather than the number of people buying them.
What has changed is the margin for error. With almost 14 months of stock and only two in five listings finding a buyer, a home priced to match what buyers can borrow this autumn still sells in a sensible timeframe. A home priced to match last year sits, gets reduced, and too often comes off the market without selling at all. Very little else separates the 54,679 homes that have sold this year from the 68,053 that have been withdrawn.
The Budget on 28th October will settle part of the uncertainty and mortgage rates will settle the rest, whenever they move. Neither is worth waiting for if you want to move, because the asking price you launch at is the one part of this you control completely, and in a market like the current one it decides very nearly everything else.
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