56,100 Approvals: The Autumn Buyer Pool Just Shrank 15%

By Lisa Hayes · 3 September 2026

Lenders approved 56,100 mortgages for house purchase in July, down from 58,200 in June and roughly 15% down on the same month last year, according to the Bank of England's latest Money and Credit release. Approvals are the closest thing the housing market has to a crystal ball: they tell you who is buying in two or three months' time, not who bought last spring. So the number published on 1 September isn't really about July at all. It's the size of the buyer pool that will be competing for your house in October and November.

That's the story, and it's a more useful one than the house price headlines that ran alongside it.

• 56,100mortgage approvals for house purchase, July 2026
• 60,800previous six-month average
• −15.0%approvals versus July 2025
• 4.45%effective rate on newly drawn mortgages

What actually happened in the July mortgage data?

The Bank of England publishes Money and Credit on the first working day of each month. It is dry, it gets a fraction of the coverage a house price index gets, and it is far more useful to anyone actually trying to sell a home.

Here's what it said. Net mortgage approvals for house purchase fell to 56,100 in July, down 2,100 from June's 58,200. That sits well below the previous six-month average of 60,800. Net borrowing of mortgage debt by individuals dropped much harder — from £7.7 billion in June to £4.3 billion in July, against a six-month average of £5.3 billion. Remortgage approvals went the other way, edging up to 34,500 from 34,100.

And the cost of the money kept climbing. The effective interest rate on newly drawn mortgages rose to 4.45% in July from 4.35% in June. The rate on the outstanding stock of mortgages — what the whole country is collectively paying — nudged up to 3.97%.

Anthony Codling, Managing Director of Equity Research at RBC Capital Markets, put the sharpest number on it. Approvals were down 3.7% month on month and down 15.0% year on year, sitting 7.3% below the five-year average and 13% below the ten-year average. His words: "a disappointing retreat from the firmer run-rate we'd grown accustomed to."

June had looked like the turn. Approvals had risen, borrowing had jumped, and a fair few people in the industry allowed themselves to believe the recovery had started. July took that back.

Why does a mortgage approval number matter more than a house price?

Because house price indices are a rear-view mirror and approvals are a windscreen.

Think about the sequence. A buyer gets a mortgage approved. Then they find a house, or they've already found one. Then they instruct a solicitor. Then searches, enquiries, chains, delays. Then exchange and completion. On current timings that's routinely three to six months from approval to keys — and TwentyEA data reported last month suggested six in ten sales are now taking longer than six months to exchange.

So a mortgage approved in July becomes a completed sale in October, November, possibly later. The Land Registry then records it, and the ONS reports it a couple of months after that. By the time "October house prices" appear in a newspaper, the decisions behind them were made in the summer.

Jason Tebb, President of OnTheMarket, made the point plainly: approvals are "a more useful measure of market activity than prices as they indicate future borrowing."

Jeremy Leaf, the north London agent and former RICS residential chairman, put a timeframe on it: "Approvals are a good indicator of activity over the next three months at least, and these suggest buyers and sellers are cautious about prospects while economic and political factors remain so uncertain."

If you are putting a house on the market in September, this is your buyer pool. Not a forecast of it. It already exists, it has already been counted, and it is about 15% smaller than the pool that was chasing houses this time last year.

Why did approvals fall when the Bank of England hasn't moved?

This is the bit that confuses people, and fairly so. The base rate has been held at 3.75%. The Bank has sat still for several meetings in a row. If the Bank isn't moving, why are mortgage costs going up and buyers going quiet?

Because your mortgage rate isn't priced off the base rate. Fixed-rate mortgages are priced off swap rates — the cost to a lender of borrowing money at a fixed price for two or five years. Swaps move on what markets expect the Bank to do, and expectations have been all over the place this year.

The driver has been the conflict in the Middle East. Energy prices up, inflation risk up, market interest rates up. Robert Gardner, Nationwide's Chief Economist, described "geopolitical tensions" exerting "upward pressure on energy prices and market interest rates," with expectations for Bank Rate "volatile."

Gareth Lewis, Deputy Chief Executive at MT Finance, was blunter: "Volatile funding rates are the real issue; while everything pointed towards a lower interest rate environment this year, the impact of war in the Middle East has since changed this outlook."

And Hina Bhudia, Partner at Knight Frank Finance, gave the number that matters to a buyer: leading two-year fixed rates have been "as low as 4.45%," but "we'd need to see those rates fall closer to four before a more sustained recovery takes hold."

Note the gap between the best-buy rate and the average rate. Rachel Springall, Finance Expert at Moneyfactscompare.co.uk, pointed to an average two-year fixed rate of 5.59%, versus 4.85% in February. On a £250,000 mortgage over 25 years, that's repayments of roughly £1,548 a month — about £1,300 more a year than in February. The sharpest borrowers with the biggest deposits are getting 4.45%. Plenty of others are paying well over five.

That spread is why "mortgage rates" as a single figure is close to meaningless. Your buyer's rate depends on their deposit, their credit file, their income, and how much homework they've done. Two buyers looking at the same house can be looking at very different monthly numbers.

The numbers, side by side

Bank of England Money and Credit	June 2026	July 2026	Six-month average
Approvals for house purchase	58,200	56,100	60,800
Net mortgage borrowing	£7.7bn	£4.3bn	£5.3bn
Approvals for remortgaging	34,100	34,500	—
Effective rate, new mortgages	4.35%	4.45%	—
Effective rate, outstanding stock	3.96%	3.97%	—

Source: Bank of England, Money and Credit, July 2026.

Is this a genuine slowdown or a summer wobble?

Honestly? A bit of both, and the honest answer is that one month never settles it.

The case for "wobble": July is a holiday month. Buyers go away. Approvals dipped in May, recovered in June, dipped again in July — that's noise as much as trend. Remortgage approvals actually rose, which tells you the mortgage machine is working fine; it's purchase demand that's soft, not lending capacity. And Zoopla has reported searches for homes to buy running 7% up year on year, which is the first flicker of the autumn crowd waking up.

Richard Pike, sales and marketing director at Phoebus Software, framed it as the open question it is: "If approvals continue to fall, it would point to a more sustained loss of momentum. If they stabilise and begin to recover, July may prove to have been a temporary setback."

The case for "genuine slowdown" is stronger than most of the commentary has admitted, and it rests on one number. Down 15% year on year. That is not seasonal noise — last July was also a holiday month. Being 7.3% below the five-year average and 13% below the ten-year average isn't seasonal either. Those comparisons already have summer built into them.

So here's the read. The month-on-month fall is unremarkable. The year-on-year fall is the thing. Roughly one in seven of the buyers who were financed and hunting a year ago simply isn't in the market now. If you're pricing your house off what your neighbour achieved in autumn 2025, you're pricing into a market that has lost a meaningful chunk of its demand.

But didn't Nationwide say house prices went up?

It did, and this is a good example of why you should read past the headline.

Nationwide reported UK house prices up 0.2% month on month in August, with annual growth of 1.6% against 1.4% in July — which reads as an acceleration. The average price was £275,465.

Except July's figure had been revised. Nationwide's own notes to editors explain that a system change meant some cases were missing from the original sample, and the revision reduced July's annual change by 0.4 percentage points. July was originally published as 1.8%. It became 1.4%. Growth didn't speed up from 1.4% to 1.6%; the previous month was marked down, and the comparison flattered August.

Meanwhile the average price of £275,465 is £3,415 below April's peak of £278,880. Prices are flat to slightly down over four months.

None of which contradicts the mortgage data. It confirms it. Weak demand, flat prices, fewer transactions — that's one coherent picture, and both datasets are telling you the same thing from different angles.

What does this mean if you're selling this autumn?

It means competition for your house will be thinner than it was a year ago, and the buyers who do turn up will be better organised and harder-nosed than the ones you remember.

Consider who is left. The 56,100 people approved in July are, by definition, the committed ones. They went through affordability checks in a month when rates were rising and the news was uncertain. They didn't drift into it. They have a number, they know what it buys, and they have plenty of choice about where to spend it.

Nick Leeming, Chairman of Jackson-Stops, described the dynamic well: "Buyers continue to benefit from considerable choice; sellers who respond to current market evidence will be best placed to capture that demand. Realistic pricing does not mean leaving value on the table; it means creating the conditions for committed, finance-ready buyers to compete."

That last sentence is the whole game. The mistake sellers make in a market like this is treating the asking price as an opening bid to be negotiated down. In a thin market, an ambitious asking price doesn't get negotiated — it gets ignored. Your listing simply never enters the shortlist of a buyer who filtered by price. You then sit, go stale, reduce, and end up accepting less than a realistic price would have achieved in week two.

Jeremy Leaf described exactly this from his own offices: sellers focused on the difference between what they get and what they pay — rather than on the headline asking price — are more likely to move. If you're selling and buying in the same market, a soft market cuts both ways. You may take less; you'll also pay less. The gap is what actually affects your life.

If you want a sense of where your own home genuinely sits, our guide to how much your house is worth walks through valuing against real, recent evidence rather than aspiration, and our house prices page tracks what the major indices are actually reporting.

The Budget question: should you just wait?

The Autumn Budget lands at the end of October, and property tax is squarely in the frame. Plenty of buyers and sellers are using it as a reason to sit still.

Hina Bhudia of Knight Frank Finance named the risk: "In previous years, reports of potential changes to property taxation have prompted buyers to put plans on hold. This year has been quieter, but speculation regarding the contents of the Budget will only rise as we move through September."

Nathan Emerson, Chief Executive of Propertymark, made the same observation: "With the Autumn Budget due next month, many people may be holding back on major housing decisions until there is greater economic clarity."

Here's the practical problem with waiting. If you hold off until the Budget, so does everyone else — and then you all list in November, into the thinnest weeks of the year, and you compete with each other. The people advising you to wait for certainty are describing a queue they intend to join.

There is a version of waiting that makes sense: if a specific announced measure would change your position by tens of thousands of pounds, and you can genuinely afford to sit, then sit. But "wait and see what happens" as a general posture usually just costs you the autumn window and hands you a January market instead.

Amy Reynolds of Richmond agency Antony Roberts flagged the pattern from last year — the market slowing prematurely ahead of the Budget. It happened then. It can happen again. The sellers who did well last autumn were the ones who moved before everyone else decided to freeze.

What should you actually do now?

1. Price against evidence, not against 2025. Get three valuations and ask each agent for actual sold comparables from the last three months, not asking prices of homes still sitting on the portals. Ask directly: what did you list this at, and what did it sell for?

2. Assume your buyer is rate-constrained. A buyer on 5.59% can afford meaningfully less house than a buyer on 4.45%. Price into the band where the most approved buyers can actually reach you, not just above it. Crossing a psychological threshold — £250,000, £300,000 — costs you far more in lost visibility than the few thousand you'd be giving up.

3. Get your paperwork done before you list. With six in ten sales taking more than six months to exchange, delay is the single biggest killer of deals in this market. Have your title documents, guarantees, building regs and management pack ready on day one. In a market of nervous buyers, a slow chain is where sales die.

4. Qualify your buyer hard. An offer from someone with an agreement in principle from July is worth considerably more than an offer from someone who "will speak to a broker." Ask which lender, ask what rate, ask when the agreement expires. Approved buyers are the scarce commodity right now — check you actually have one.

5. Know what the alternatives really cost. If speed or certainty matters more to you than squeezing the last few percent — a job move, a divorce, a probate sale, a chain about to collapse — there are routes that trade price for certainty. Our guides to selling your house fast and to cash house buyers explain how these work and, importantly, what they cost. They are not right for everyone. But when the open market is offering you six months of uncertainty, a firm number in a few weeks has a value that's easy to underrate.

6. Learn the vocabulary before someone uses it on you. Down-valuation, chain-free, subject to contract, gazundering — the jargon exists partly to move risk quietly onto whoever understands it least. Our property jargon explained guide covers the terms that actually cost you money.

What happens next?

Three dates worth having in your head.

17 September — the Bank of England's next rate decision. A hold looks most likely, but it is genuinely hard to call. Mark Harris, chief executive of mortgage broker SPF Private Clients, warned that "markets are still pricing in the possibility of one further rate rise this year," and that policymakers may prefer to wait until after the Budget. His message to borrowers was uncomfortable but fair: "rates may not have peaked."

Late October — the Autumn Budget. The first from Chancellor John Healey. Property taxation is the live question, and the speculation will get louder through September whatever ends up being announced.

1 October — August's Money and Credit data. This is the one to actually watch. If approvals stabilise around 56,000, July was a wobble. If they fall again, the autumn market is genuinely thinner than the headlines suggest and pricing needs to reflect it. One month is noise. Two is a trend.

Beyond that, the broad direction is not bleak. Robert Gardner's assessment is that underlying affordability is improving, because house price growth is running well below earnings growth, and that "activity should regain momentum in the quarters ahead providing the energy shock wanes and confidence returns." Wages catching up with house prices is how affordability repairs itself without a crash. It's slow, it's boring, and it's the healthiest outcome available.

The problem is that "the quarters ahead" is no help if you need to sell this autumn.

The bottom line

The market hasn't fallen over. Prices are broadly flat, lenders are lending, and there's a real pool of financed, motivated buyers out there — 56,100 of them approved in July alone. But there are fewer of them than there were, they have more choice than they've had in years, and they are in no hurry.

That doesn't mean don't sell. It means sell properly. Price to the buyer who exists today rather than the one who existed in 2025, get your paperwork in order before the first viewing, qualify every offer, and don't let the Budget become an excuse to lose three months.

And before you commit to a route, find out what your options are actually worth. Comparing genuine offers side by side — open market, quick sale, cash buyer — is the only way to know whether the certainty is worth the discount, or whether you're leaving money on the table. You can compare offers for your property here, free and with no obligation. Knowing your numbers is never the wrong move, whichever way you end up going.