UK Premium Property Market Update June 2026
Anyone buying or selling in the premium market has had two developments to absorb this year, and they arrived from opposite directions.
The first is in the numbers. The premium market ended June carrying more property than it has ever carried, more than 100,000 homes for sale at once, a level it had never previously touched. The second is in Westminster, where Britain has a new Prime Minister who has spent the better part of a decade arguing that this country taxes property in the wrong place and at the wrong moment.
Neither amounts to a crisis. Between them, though, they explain most of how the top of the market has behaved this year, and they will do more than mortgage rates to shape what happens between now and Christmas.
Supply climbed to a record through the half and kept climbing. Sales eased, though by less than the annual comparison suggests. Sellers cut their asking prices in numbers rarely seen, and the deals they did agree held together better than they did a year ago. Buyers have more choice at this price point than at any moment in recent years and more room to negotiate to go with it. What has changed since the spring is where the pressure comes from. The rate shock has faded, the political question has replaced it and the political question happens to be the one the premium market feels most keenly.
June 2026 at a glance
Metric (£750,000+)
June 2026
vs May
vs June 25
vs average
Properties for sale
101,527
+3.3%
+2.7%
+27.0%
New listings
18,240
-4.2%
+4.0%
+11.7%
Sales agreed
8,225
-3.8%
-5.5%
-2.2%
Price reductions
9,509
level
-9.5%
+28.4%
Withdrawn
9,697
+14.5%
+2.9%
+23.6%
Fall throughs
1,826
+5.4%
-3.1%
-3.9%
Stock passes one hundred thousand
June took the premium pool past a number it had never reached. There were 101,527 homes for sale above £750,000, up 3.3% on May, 2.7% on June last year and 27.0% above the 79,933 that is the average June of 2021-2026. The market above £750,000 is carrying roughly a quarter more property than it normally does at this point in the year and the pile is still growing.
New listings did their part. 18,240 premium homes came to market in June, down 4.2% on a busy May, but up 4.0% on last June and 11.7% above the 2021-2026 average. That is the pattern of the entire half. Fresh instructions arrive in numbers well beyond normal, sales absorb fewer of them than they once did and the difference accumulates on the shelf month after month.
June premium stock passes 100,000 for the first time
Premium properties for sale above £750,000, month of June, 2021 to 2026.
If you are buying, nothing else in this update matters as much. You have never had more to choose from at this price point. Sellers meet the same fact from the wrong end of it, because all 101,527 of those homes are competing for the attention of a smaller pool of buyers than existed a year ago.
Sales ease, though not as far as the headline suggests
8,225 premium sales were agreed in June, 3.8% down on May, 5.5% down on June last year and 2.2% below the 2021-2026 average. Taken on its own that is a soft month. Set against the run of Junes it looks less alarming. June 2026 sits above both June 2021 and June 2023, and the years pulling that average upwards are 2022 and 2025, one a frenzy and the other a market still working through the rush to beat a stamp duty deadline. Measured against an ordinary June, premium demand is a little below par.
The buyers active above £750,000 right now are fewer in number, slower to commit and far better informed about what else is available. None of that is the same as refusing to buy. More than 8,000 of them agreed a purchase in a single month, which is not the behaviour of a market that has stopped.
The wave of reductions that did not reach the top
Here the premium market parted company with everything beneath it. Across the country as a whole, June was the heaviest month for price reductions ever recorded, close to 108,800 of them, up almost 10% on May and 6% on last June. Above £750,000 the picture was different. Premium reductions came in at 9,509, exactly level with May and 9.5% below June last year.
Premium sellers have not stopped adjusting. At 28.4% above the 2021-2026 average, reductions above £750,000 are still running far hotter than normal and set against 8,225 sales that is roughly nine homes marked down for every eight that found a buyer. What the June figure shows is a premium seller who declined to join the mainstream stampede to cut. They did something else instead.
The same split shows up in the independent data. TwentyCi puts the proportion of listings taking at least one reduction at 38.4% nationally this year, all but unchanged on 2025, but the movement within that figure sits entirely at the bottom of the market. Homes below £200,000 saw their reduction rate climb by 0.7 percentage points over the year. Homes above £1m saw theirs fall by 0.9 points, the largest improvement of any price band. Two datasets, one conclusion. The cutting this year has been concentrated a long way below the premium market.
The month the premium seller reached for the off button
9,697 premium homes were withdrawn from the market in June, up 14.5% on May, 2.9% on last June and 23.6% above the 2021-2026 average. It is the heaviest June for premium withdrawals in recent years.
Hold that against the mainstream market, where withdrawals in June fell to their lowest monthly figure since December 2022, down 37% on May. The two ends of the market moved in opposite directions and that contrast is the most revealing thing in this month's figures. Faced with a slow market, the mainstream seller cut the price and stayed. The premium seller, more often than in any recent June, took the property off the market and waited.
The premium seller's choice: cut the price, or pull the property
Premium price reductions and withdrawals above £750,000, month of June, 2021 to 2026.
You can see the switch in the chart. In June last year premium reductions ran more than a thousand ahead of withdrawals. This June withdrawals came out in front. That reads as a shift in temperament, not simply a change of tactic. A seller above £750,000 is usually moving by choice, and usually sitting on a home they can comfortably afford to keep. When the political weather turns and the tax questions grow louder, waiting for a clearer sky becomes a real option. This summer a good many took it.
A record stock figure overstates how much is genuinely available. A slice of this market is on the shelf in name only.
There is a practical read in this for both sides. If you are selling, a good number of your competitors have chosen to sit the summer out, which thins the field for anyone prepared to price properly and get on with it. If you are buying, treat the headline stock figure with some suspicion. Not every one of those hundred thousand homes has a motivated owner behind it.
The deals that agree are still sticking
1,826 premium sales fell through in June, up 5.4% on a quiet May but 3.1% below last June and 3.9% under the 2021-2026 average. Across the half the improvement is clearer still, and it has been one of the steadier features of 2026. Premium chains are proving sturdier than they were a year ago. A deal agreed above £750,000 in this market stands a better chance of completing than it did in 2025, which counts for something in a year when very little else has felt certain.
The first half in full
Step back from the single month and the half tells the same story in a calmer voice. The premium market carried more stock, took more instructions and absorbed more reductions than it did a year ago, while holding on to most of its sales and losing fewer of them along the way.
Metric (£750,000+)
H1 2026
vs H1 25
vs average
vs H2 25
Properties for sale
90,077
+3.3%
+26.7%
-0.7%
New listings
103,566
+2.8%
+17.0%
+39.5%
Sales agreed
42,011
-4.7%
-2.0%
+9.0%
Price reductions
41,193
-1.2%
+33.8%
+17.0%
Withdrawn
49,478
+5.5%
+24.3%
-20.3%
Fall throughs
9,070
-10.4%
+1.3%
-4.5%
Six straight years of rising supply
New listings above £750,000 reached 103,566 across the first half, up 2.8% on 2025 and 17.0% above the 2021-2026 average. The run behind that number is the striking part: 67,183, then 79,144, 84,360, 96,053, 100,735 and now 103,566. Premium supply has risen every single year since 2021, through double digit inflation, a rate shock, a mini budget, a general election, two wars and a change of Prime Minister on a few occasions. Nothing in six years has interrupted it.
Premium new listings have risen every year since 2021
New premium listings above £750,000, January to June, 2021 to 2026.
Stock followed. The premium market averaged 90,077 homes for sale across the half, up 3.3% on the same stretch of 2025 and 26.7% above the 2021-2026 average. No first half on record has carried this much premium property.
One comparison in that table runs against the seasonal grain and is worth a moment. Premium stock in the first half of 2026 was 0.7% below the second half of 2025. That sounds unremarkable until you remember that the back half of a year is normally when unsold stock piles up and the first half is when it clears. This year the first half began roughly where the last one ended. The clear out never really happened, and the market carried its 2025 overhang straight into 2026 before adding to it.
Demand held its shape better than the annual figure suggests
42,011 premium sales were agreed across the half, 4.7% down on 2025 and 2.0% below the 2021-2026 average. Against the more recent and more comparable years it looks quite different. Sales are 0.4% ahead of the first half of 2024 and 11.2% ahead of 2023. The comparison doing the damage is with 2025, a first half inflated by the rush to beat the stamp duty change and with the frantic markets of 2021 and 2022. Set against an ordinary year, premium demand in 2026 is close to where you would expect it. Against the second half of last year the figure is 9.0% higher, which is the usual work of a spring market and no more than that.
The people still moving are older and better off
Volumes tell you how much is happening. They say nothing about who is doing it and on that question the market changed more in twelve months than the headline figures suggest. TwentyCi splits owner occupied movers by age and by household income. Both splits moved the same way and both moved a long way.
Age of mover
Q2 2025
Q2 2026
Change
66 and over
17.3%
24.4%
+40.6%
46 to 65
35.1%
40.3%
+14.6%
36 to 45
23.2%
19.7%
-15.3%
26 to 35
21.2%
14.4%
-32.2%
18 to 25
3.1%
1.3%
-58.4%
Share of owner occupied homemovers by age. The change column shows the relative movement in each group's share of the market. Source: TwentyCi.
A year ago, movers aged 46 and over made up a little over half of all owner occupied moves, at 52.4%. They now make up close to two thirds, at 64.7%. The 46 to 65 band on its own accounts for 40.3% of everything that exchanges, and the share held by those aged 66 and over grew by 40.6%, the largest movement anywhere in the table. Every age group below 46 lost ground, and the under 26s lost well over half of what little share they had.
Household income
Q2 2025
Q2 2026
Change
£150,000 and above
2.9%
3.8%
+31.3%
£100,000 to £149,999
9.7%
10.9%
+12.5%
£70,000 to £99,999
20.3%
20.5%
+1.0%
£60,000 to £69,999
9.9%
9.7%
-2.6%
£50,000 to £59,999
11.5%
11.2%
-2.9%
£40,000 to £49,999
14.2%
13.2%
-6.8%
£30,000 to £39,999
14.0%
12.8%
-8.9%
£20,000 to £29,999
12.0%
10.9%
-9.5%
Share of owner occupied homemovers by annual household income. The change column shows the relative movement in each group's share of the market. Source: TwentyCi.
The income table says the same thing in a different language. Every band below £70,000 lost ground across the year. Every band above it gained. Households earning more than £150,000 increased their share by 31.3%, and those between £100,000 and £150,000 by 12.5%.
For anyone selling a property at the premium end of the market, these two tables are the most encouraging evidence in this update. The moving population is getting older and wealthier at the same time and in this market those are two descriptions of one household. An owner in their fifties or sixties has been on the ladder for two or three decades and carries the equity that comes with it. They depend least on a mortgage, feel the rate cycle least and are the most able to move on their own timetable. They are also, straightforwardly, the people who buy premium property. A thirty year old priced out of a second bedroom is not a lost premium sale. A fifty five year old with substantial equity is a premium sale, or the chain immediately beneath one.
The income split carries the same logic. The households that have kept moving through a year of rate volatility, geopolitical noise and a change of Prime Minister are the households that could always afford to. Cost of living pressure does not reach them the way it reaches a family on £45,000, and a fixed rate a point higher does not change what they are able to do.
One qualification belongs alongside all of that. These are shares of the market, not counts of transactions, and a rising share can sit on top of a flat number of actual moves. Composition is the point here, though. Whatever the total, the mix has tilted heavily towards the households that transact in the premium end of the market and it has tilted a very long way in a single year.
Almost one reduction for every sale
There were 41,193 price reductions above £750,000 across the half, marginally below 2025 at 1.2% down, but 33.8% above the 2021-2026 average. Set that against 42,011 sales and the ratio is stark. For very nearly every premium home that found a buyer in the first half of 2026, another had to revisit its asking price to stay in the running.
The gap between the asking price and the value
Reductions are the visible end of a pricing problem. The invisible end sits in the distance between what sellers ask and what an independent valuation says the home is worth, and that distance has roughly doubled in a year.
TwentyCi compares the asking price of every newly listed property against an automated valuation of the same home. In the second quarter of 2025, the average new listing in the UK arrived 5.7% above its independent value. In the second quarter of 2026 it arrived 11.6% above.
Asking price against valuation
Q2 2025
Q2 2026
Change
More than 10% below value
29.1%
27.5%
-5.5%
5% to 10% below value
12.9%
12.5%
-3.0%
Within 5% below value
20.9%
21.2%
+1.7%
Within 5% above value
14.2%
14.0%
-1.4%
5% to 10% above value
7.2%
7.5%
+4.2%
More than 10% above value
15.8%
17.3%
+9.7%
Share of newly listed UK stock in each band, asking price measured against an automated valuation of the same property. The change column shows the relative year on year movement in each band's share of listed stock. Source: TwentyCi.
A home listed two or three per cent above market value still tends to attract buyers and still tends to sell in reasonable time. Past that the odds lengthen quickly, and the share of stock priced more than a tenth above value has risen by nearly 10% in a year.
The regional detail is where this becomes a premium problem, because the sharpest moves towards overpricing sit in the places premium property concentrates. In the East of England the share of stock priced more than 10% above value rose 19.3% over the year. Outer London rose 17.8% and the South East 16.7%. Inner London, already the most heavily discounted market in the country, moved the other way and now carries less stock priced 10% above value than it did a year ago. The capital has taken its medicine. The commuter belt around it has not.
The country house market is muddled in both directions at once. The Times ran a piece this summer on a perfect storm gathering over country house prices as taxes and running costs mount. Across the Cotswolds postcodes the share of stock priced more than 10% above value rose almost 11% on the year, and yet the share arriving below independent value rose too, by 12.7% in the band just under value and 15.6% in the band immediately below it. Sellers and their agents in that market are pricing less consistently than they were a year ago, which is what tends to happen when nobody is confident where the floor sits.
This is not a market that has stopped buying. It is a market that has stopped accepting the first number.
Sellers stayed in, but more of them stepped back
The commitment picture is genuinely mixed this half, and the two sides of it are worth separating.
Fall throughs came in at 9,070, down 10.4% on 2025 and only 1.3% above the 2021-2026 average, so the deals being agreed above £750,000 are going the distance more reliably than they were twelve months ago. That mirrors the national picture, where fall throughs ran nearly 9% below last year and the share of listings suffering at least one collapse eased to 23.4%.
The less comfortable half is withdrawals. Premium withdrawals reached 49,478, up 5.5% on the first half of 2025 and 24.3% above the 2021-2026 average. Nationally, withdrawals across the same six months were down almost 5% on last year. Once again the top of the market moved the other way. Below £750,000 fewer sellers gave up this year than last. Above it, more did.
The shape of the premium market across the first half
First half premium measures above £750,000, each compared with its own 2021 to 2026 first half average.
The politics stopped being speculation
For most of this year these updates have described the political risk to the premium market as a question hanging over it. In July it stopped hanging and landed. Keir Starmer stood down and after a contest that turned into a coronation, Andy Burnham was confirmed as Labour leader unopposed on 17th July with the nominations of 379 of the party's 403 MPs. He entered Number 10 on 20th July, with John Healey as his Chancellor.
For most of the housing market this is background noise. In the premium market, it is the main event, for structural reasons more than partisan ones. The premium market runs on wealth more than on borrowing. A large share of buyers above £1m, and the overwhelming majority above £2m, are paying cash or putting down deposits big enough that a shift in fixed rate pricing barely touches their arithmetic. That insulation cuts both ways. The cost of money does not move this market. What moves it is anything that touches the value of the asset itself, and the new Prime Minister arrives with more history on that subject than any of his recent predecessors.
The record is on the public file. He has called council tax highly regressive, its valuations still based on what homes were worth in 1991. He has backed the campaign for a proportional property tax to replace both council tax and stamp duty. He has argued for a land value tax for years, describing it in one interview as a productive form of taxation because it discourages people from hoarding land. None of that is government policy today and no legislation has been brought forward on any of it. But a Prime Minister's long held convictions are the ground on which markets set their expectations and expectations are what price property.
The mansion tax is already in the offers
The nearest and most concrete of these questions is the High Value Council Tax Surcharge, the mansion tax in all but name, announced in the November 2025 Budget and due to apply from April 2028 to homes in England worth more than £2m. The structure is settled. It runs at £2,500 a year on homes above £2m, £3,500 above £2.5m, £5,000 above £3.5m and £7,500 above £5m, uprated annually with inflation and revalued every five years. The Office for Budget Responsibility now expects it to catch around 165,000 homes in its first year, up from an initial estimate nearer 120,000, and reckons a fifth of owners will appeal, with as many as two in five of those appeals succeeding.
What has changed since June is the threshold. Reports through July have suggested the new government is weighing a reduction from £2m to £1.5m. Tax Policy Associates estimates that would take the number of homes caught from around 127,000 to roughly 243,000 and lift the net revenue towards £800m. Hamptons puts the additional homes at 137,000, for a total above 271,000. Nothing has been confirmed and no proposal has been published, so this belongs firmly in the column marked speculation.
Speculation is doing the work regardless and this is the part that matters if you own or are buying a home anywhere near that range. LonRes recorded sales of London homes at £2m and above running down almost a fifth across the first half of 2026 against the same period of 2025, with the £5m and above market off 15%. The buying agent Henry Pryor has said he is now factoring the surcharge into homes valued as low as £1.25m, and including it in every offer he makes.
There is a second effect and it runs in the opposite direction. The shift in the profile of movers set out earlier in this update, towards older owners and higher earning households, may be partly a response to the surcharge. TwentyCi puts it forward as one plausible reason the affluent end of the market has stayed so much more active than the rest and every exchange is a sale as well as a purchase. If that reading holds, some part of the record supply now sitting on the premium market is not the usual mix of relocation and downsizing at all. It is people getting ahead of a tax that has not yet arrived.
Buyers are not waiting for a threshold to be confirmed before pricing it in. A tax that may never be extended is already coming out of offers.
The cost of borrowing, and why it counts for less up here
Rates have improved since the spring, and the improvement has carried on into July. The Bank of England has held base rate at 3.75% since December, with the June vote hardening to seven to two as a second member pushed for a rise, and the next decision falls on 30th July. Fixed rate pricing has eased in the meantime. Moneyfacts now has both the average two year and the average five year fix at 5.52%, their lowest since the start of March and the biggest monthly fall in either since October 2024, with product choice back above 7,100 and the odd inversion that saw five year money priced below two year money beginning to unwind.
That is real relief for a borrower and it is worth having. At this price point it is also less decisive than it sounds. The rate backdrop bites hardest in the debt reliant middle of the premium band, the £750,000 to £1.5m bracket full of upsizing families taking on the largest loans they will ever carry. Above £2m it is something to keep half an eye on. Which is precisely why the political question has taken over. In a segment where most of the money is not borrowed, prices move on what the state might do to the value of the asset.
The geography of the softening
Where the pressure sits has not changed all year, and the premium market feels it more sharply than the mainstream because so much premium property sits in exactly the places under most strain. Zoopla has London running nine straight months of small annual price falls, its values 0.2% down over the year and the South East 0.3% below, while the North East and North West are up 3.5% and Scotland 3.0%. Halifax reads the divide the same way and rather more sharply. LonRes has average prime London sale prices down around 5% over the year, with the typical discount from the initial asking price at 10.4% in June and more than half of everything that sold having been reduced at some point first.
Transaction volumes tell a messier version of the same story and it is worth resisting a tidy summary. Sales agreed fell in every UK region in the second quarter, but the spread ran from Scotland at 2% down to the North West and Inner London both at 8%. At city level Edinburgh actually grew, up 7.1% on the same quarter of 2025, while Manchester fell 15% and Bristol 9.4%. Holding value and doing volume are two different things, and the northern markets managing the first are not always the ones managing the second.
There is a supply story underneath the London weakness too. Something like 254,000 former rental homes came to the sales market in the year to March, 28% more than two years earlier and the exodus has been heaviest in London, where they now account for roughly 30% of new sale listings against 13% elsewhere. Landlords leaving ahead of tighter regulation have added a layer of stock to precisely the market least able to absorb it.
Savills has set its prime forecast to match, expecting prime central London to fall by around 3.0% across 2026 and pushing the recovery out to 2028 rather than 2027, with the more affordable prime markets of the Midlands, the North, Scotland and Wales holding flat and outperforming. If you are selling a premium home in Cheshire, Yorkshire or the Scottish central belt, your market is in materially better health than the one making the headlines.
Time is the other cost
The half also brought the most far reaching reform of the homebuying process in a generation, announced in mid June and aimed squarely at the delays and collapsed deals that have dogged the market for years. The numbers behind it are sobering, and they get worse the further up the market you go.
Nationally, the time between listing a home and agreeing a sale has barely moved. It stood at an average of 76 days across the first half, flat on last year. That stability disappears the moment the figure is split by price. Time to sale agreed has risen only in the bands above £350,000, and the £1m plus segment stands alone, up 4.2% on the year to 114 days. A million pound home now takes half as long again to find a buyer as the national average.
Then comes the second wait. The average time from sale agreed to exchange reached 130 days across the UK, five days longer than last year. Above £1m only 38.2% of agreed sales exchange within three months, against 54.2% of homes below £200,000, and 8.1% take seven months or more. Put the two stages together and a premium seller is realistically looking at eight months from instruction to exchange, against the seven the national average implies.
The dearer the home, the longer the wait to exchange
Cumulative share of agreed sales reaching exchange, by months elapsed and price band, Q2 2026. Source: TwentyCi.
That length has a consequence nobody designed for. Property searches expire after six months. The share of exchanges taking longer than six months from instruction has climbed from 36.1% in 2019 to 60.8% so far this year, which means most transactions now outlive the paperwork holding them together, and premium transactions outlive it by a comfortable margin.
The reforms bring upfront information packs at the point of listing, earlier binding agreements with a financial penalty for walking away without good reason, and a wholesale shift to digital conveyancing. None of it lands overnight and the roadmap runs across the rest of this Parliament. For a premium seller the timetable matters less than the direction of travel, which is towards getting a property to market properly rather than quickly. That change rewards preparation and it rewards it most where the paperwork is heaviest.
If you are selling a premium property
The asking price you set on day one is still the most consequential decision in the whole process, and this half has made the case more forcefully than any before it. Across the first half there were 41,193 reductions against 42,011 sales. In prime London more than half of everything that sold had been reduced first, at an average discount of more than a tenth off the original asking price. Homes that arrive priced correctly still sell. Homes that arrive at last year's number sit until they are cut, and then sit some more.
Pitching high and trimming later has stopped working and the reason is that buyers can see the whole history. A reduction tells them the first figure was wrong, and they use it against you in the negotiation that follows. Every week spent at the wrong price widens the gap between what you asked and what you eventually get. The valuation evidence says the same thing from the other side. New stock is now arriving 11.6% above independent value on average, twice the gap of a year ago, and across the home counties the overpricing is heavier still.
There is a second decision this half has put in front of premium sellers and it is a newer one. Nearly ten thousand of your competitors withdrew in June alone. Waiting for political clarity is a real option and plenty are taking it. Be honest with yourself about what you are waiting for, though. The autumn Budget is more likely to reopen the property tax question than settle it, the threshold speculation will probably get louder rather than quieter over the summer and the consensus forecast has prime values drifting a little lower across the rest of this year with no recovery expected before 2028. Waiting is not free. It means pricing into a benchmark that is itself moving down.
If you are selling anywhere above £1.5m the calculation is sharper still, because buyers are already discounting for a tax that has not been announced. That discount does not disappear by ignoring it. It gets negotiated.
One practical point follows from the timings. At 114 days to find a buyer and another four months or so to exchange, a premium home listed in September completes in the spring. Any seller treating the autumn Budget as a deadline has already missed it and the honest question is whether to go now and price for the market as it is, or wait deliberately and come back in the new year with a clear head.
If you are buying a premium property
Conditions are as favourable as they have been in years and it is worth being specific about why. There has never been more premium property on the market than there is right now. Sellers are cutting prices at a third above the normal rate. The mansion tax speculation is suppressing values at the top of the range before any tax has been levied. Mortgage pricing is easing. And if you are buying largely with cash or a modest loan, almost none of the pressure weighing on this market weighs on you.
Policy deserves more of your attention than price. The direction of travel on property taxation is towards taxing the holding of a home rather than the moving of it. If that direction holds, the annual cost of owning an expensive house rises while the one off cost of buying one falls. Anything above £1.5m needs that possibility built into the sums, on a long enough view to matter.
Against that sits the case for moving while the choice is this wide. The seller pool is at a record and will not stay there. Withdrawals are already taking stock off the market. Fixed rates are falling. And a considerable reservoir of held back demand is waiting for exactly the political clarity that will arrive at some point over the next twelve months. The choice in front of you today is wider than the one you will have in six months.
Budget for the wait as well as the price. Above £1m the average purchase takes the best part of eight months from the seller's instruction through to exchange. Nationally, 60.8% of transactions now run past the six month expiry on the legal searches and premium transactions sit well the wrong side of that average, so build a refresh of the searches into your expectations and your timetable.
Where the premium market goes from here
The premium market is not in trouble and nothing in the first half data suggests it is heading there. Record stock is not distress. Reductions running above the norm show a market clearing an unusually large amount of property. Fall throughs are improving. Arrears and repossessions remain low, which matters more than any single figure in this update, because a real correction needs forced sellers and there are very few of them about.
What the half does show is a market that has changed hands. Buyers hold the advantage now, decisively, and they are using it. More choice, more time, more room to negotiate and a price history they can read in full. Sellers who understand that are still transacting perfectly well. Sellers who do not are joining the reductions column, or the withdrawals column.
The second half turns on two questions, and neither of them is interest rates. The first is what the new government says about property taxation between now and the autumn Budget and in particular whether the £1.5m threshold speculation is confirmed or killed. The second is how long the top of the market is willing to hold its breath waiting to find out. On the evidence of June, a growing number of premium sellers have decided to wait. That thins the competition for those who stay and it will tighten supply sharply the moment confidence returns.
The floor for prime values now sits a little lower, and arrives a little later, than it looked at the start of the year. As always, the buyers and sellers who see that first will come out of it best.
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