Asking Prices Fall £7,360 in August: What Sellers Do Now

By Lisa Hayes · 17 August 2026

The average asking price on a home newly listed in Britain fell by £7,360 to £364,999 in August, a drop of 2.0% in a single month and the biggest August fall Rightmove has recorded since 2018. Prices always dip in August, but not by this much: the ten-year average for the month is 1.3%. Asking prices are now 1.0% lower than a year ago, the steepest annual fall since December 2023, and Rightmove has cut its 2026 forecast from a 2% rise to somewhere between flat and a 2% fall.

That is the news. Here is the part that actually matters if you own a home and are thinking about selling: this is not a crash. It is a correction in what sellers are asking for, and it has been coming for months. The gap between what people put on the board and what buyers were willing to pay had stretched to the point where something had to give. In August, it gave.

• £364,999average new seller asking price, August 2026
• -£7,360month-on-month fall (-2.0%)
• -1.0%annual change — biggest drop since Dec 2023
• 12-year highhomes for sale for the time of year

What exactly did Rightmove report in August 2026?

Rightmove's House Price Index measures asking prices on homes newly listed on its site, so it is the earliest read you can get on the market. It tells you what sellers and their agents believe a property is worth today, before a single viewing has happened. That makes it a sentiment gauge as much as a price gauge.

The August 2026 numbers, published on 17 August:

• The average asking price across Britain is £364,999, down 2.0% or £7,360 on July.
• That is the largest August fall since 2018, and well beyond the 1.3% ten-year average for the month.
• Annually, asking prices are 1.0% lower than August 2025 — the biggest year-on-year drop since December 2023.
• The number of homes available for sale is at a 12-year high for this point in the year.
• Rightmove has downgraded its full-year 2026 forecast from +2% to a range of zero to -2%.

A forecast downgrade partway through the year is worth pausing on. Rightmove publishes its outlook every December and rarely revises it. Going from "prices up 2%" to "prices might fall 2%" is a four-percentage-point swing in sentiment from the business with the best view of UK listings data. They did not do that lightly.

Why did sellers cut prices by so much this month?

Because the alternative was sitting there unsold.

Colleen Babcock, Rightmove's property expert, put it plainly: "This month's larger-than-usual August price drop is a sign that many sellers are recognising the reality of the market and pricing much more competitively from day one. Buyers have the widest choice of homes for sale at this time of year in more than a decade, so standing out on price for the right reasons is hugely important."

"While no seller likes to come to market lower than they might have hoped, Rightmove analysis shows that those who price realistically are statistically proven to be giving themselves the strongest chance of finding a buyer and successfully completing a move." — Colleen Babcock, Rightmove

Notice what she did not say. She did not say values have fallen 2% in a month — they haven't, and no index of completed sales is showing anything like that. She said sellers are pricing more competitively from day one. That is a behavioural shift, not a valuation collapse, and the distinction is the single most useful thing in this month's release.

For most of the last two years, the standard playbook was to list high, wait, and reduce. Buyers stopped playing along. A home that launches 8% too high in a market with this much stock does not get "reduced later" — it gets ignored, goes stale, and eventually sells for less than it would have done had it launched sensibly. Sellers have finally worked that out. August's number is the sound of thousands of people taking their agent's advice instead of the number they heard at the pub.

The figure that matters more than the price: supply

Twelve-year high. That is the statistic to hold onto.

Every other number in this release is downstream of it. When there are more homes on the market than at any August since 2014, buyers do not need to compromise, do not need to rush, and do not need to bid against anyone. They can view eleven houses and pick the best-value one. Your competition is not an abstract "market" — it's the four other three-bedroom semis within a mile of you, and at least one of them has just cut its price.

This is why generic national commentary is close to useless for an individual seller. What you need to know is how many directly comparable homes are competing with yours in your postcode, how long they have been listed, and what they have done to their asking price since launch. Our guide on how long a property has been on the market explains how to read that history — it is public information, and it tells you far more than any index.

How does the regional picture break down?

The national average hides a widening split. Rightmove reports that new seller asking prices across the northern regions of England are up 1.5% annually, while southern England is down 1.8%. That is a 3.3-point gap between two halves of the same country.

Area	Annual change in asking prices	Direction
North West England	+1.9%	Strongest in Great Britain
Northern England (all regions)	+1.5%	Rising
Great Britain average	-1.0%	Falling
Southern England (all regions)	-1.8%	Falling
London	-3.1%	Weakest in Great Britain

Source: Rightmove House Price Index, August 2026.

• North West +1.9%
• Northern England +1.5%
• Great Britain -1.0%
• Southern England -1.8%
• London -3.1%

If you are selling in Manchester, Liverpool, Preston or anywhere across the North West, the national headline does not describe your market. Asking prices there are up nearly 2% on the year. That is not a boom, but it is the opposite direction to the headline, and you should price accordingly rather than pre-emptively discounting because of something you read about "falling house prices". The reverse applies in the South East and East of England: if your neighbour sold for a strong number in early 2025, that number is not your benchmark.

For a fuller picture of how the regions have moved over the past year, our UK house prices tracker and the 2026 market trends and seller insights guide pull the major indices together in one place.

Why is London falling so much harder than everywhere else?

London is down 3.1% annually, the worst performance in Great Britain, and the capital now has more homes for sale than at any point in sixteen years.

The cause is not mysterious. Affordability in London broke first and has stayed broken. Rightmove's analysis shows the average London home costs around 17 times the national average annual wage and is priced 38% above the South East. At a 3.75% base rate and mortgage pricing to match, that maths does not work for the buyers who would normally be trading up. So they don't. And the stock builds.

Marc von Grundherr of Benham and Reeves offered a fair counterweight: "There's no denying that London is having a more challenging year than many other parts of the country and affordability is at the heart of it. However, I wouldn't characterise the London market as being in any sort of serious decline. What we're seeing is a much more price-sensitive market and sellers who acknowledge that are still finding buyers."

He is right, and "price-sensitive" is the operative phrase. London flats in particular are carrying the weight of it — service charges, cladding paperwork and leasehold complications have made them the slowest-moving stock in the country. If you own a flat in the capital and you need to move this year, you are not competing on charm. You are competing on price and on how clean your paperwork is.

Is the "Burnham bounce" real, or just a headline?

Rightmove reports buyer demand up 5% since Andy Burnham became Prime Minister on 20 July. That sounds encouraging until you set it against the other figure in the same release: buying activity remains around 10% below last year's level.

So demand has improved from a low base and is still well short of where it was twelve months ago. Babcock called it a "mini Burnham bounce" and was careful about what comes next: "Whether that develops into a more sustained recovery will likely depend on confidence, mortgage rates and the new Chancellor's first Budget this autumn."

Treat the bounce as a genuine but fragile improvement in enquiry levels. It is not a green light to add 5% to your asking price. Jeremy Leaf, the north London agent and former RICS residential chairman, made the same point from the coalface: "The change in occupier at Number 10 Downing Street has prompted some re-awakening of demand but not enough so far to reduce in sufficient numbers the amount of stock overhanging the market, particularly flats."

Asking price is not selling price — and this month proves it

This deserves its own section, because every August the same confusion goes round.

Rightmove measures what sellers ask. Nationwide and Lloyds (formerly Halifax) measure mortgage-approved purchase prices. The ONS and Land Registry measure completed transactions, months after the fact. They are four different things and they disagree constantly, because they are looking at four different points in the same long process.

Jeremy Leaf again: "Although asking prices are not selling prices but often reflect owners', or agents', aspirational starting points, these figures help demonstrate how difficult it has become to attract genuine buyers."

What the August drop actually tells you is that the aspiration gap narrowed by 2% this month. Sellers moved towards buyers. If you have been watching completed-sale indices flatline while asking prices held firm, this is the two lines starting to converge — and convergence is how a stalled market gets moving again. It is uncomfortable, but it is healthy. Frozen markets are worse for sellers than gently falling ones, because a frozen market means you cannot move at all.

If the difference between "asking", "sold subject to contract" and "sold price" isn't second nature, our property jargon explained guide is worth five minutes.

What does this mean if you're selling right now?

Four things, in order of how much they will affect your outcome.

1. Your launch price is now the whole ballgame. In a 12-year-high stock market, the first two weeks of a listing generate most of the serious viewings you will ever get. Launch 5% over and you burn that window on people who were never going to offer. Rightmove's own data says realistic pricing gives you a statistically better chance of completing — and completing, not listing, is the only thing that counts. Start with a clear-eyed view of what your home is worth by checking how much your house is worth against genuine recent comparables, not the optimistic estimate on a portal.

2. Get three valuations and distrust the highest one. An agent who quotes you £30,000 above the other two is not seeing value nobody else can see. They are buying your instruction. You will find out in November when you have had four viewings and are reducing to the figure the other two agents gave you in August, except now your listing is three months old and buyers can see that.

3. Consider offering less on your onward purchase. Babcock flagged this as a tactic sellers are actively using: accept a lower offer on your home, then make a correspondingly lower offer on the place you're buying. In a falling market, the pound you lose on the sale you often recover on the purchase — and if you're trading up, you recover more than you lose, because the same percentage on a bigger number is more money. Chain-wide realism moves chains. Stubbornness at any single link stalls all of them.

4. Fix the things that stall sales before you list. Leasehold information packs, missing building regs certificates, unresolved boundary questions. None of them affect your asking price, all of them affect whether a sale survives to completion. With chains this fragile, a legal hold-up of six weeks is now often enough to lose a buyer altogether.

The investors circling a slower market

One more finding from this week's data, and it is directly relevant to anyone selling. Analysis from Hamptons, using Connells Group data for England and Wales, found that 56% of investor offers in July were at least 10% below the initial asking price, rising to 63% among landlords buying with cash. More striking: 27% of those low offers were accepted in July 2026, against just 18% in July 2025.

David Fell, lead analyst at Hamptons, was candid about why: "When the market slows, seasoned investors rarely stand on the sidelines for long. With homes taking longer to sell and chains proving fragile, landlords are using their liquidity and chain-free status to maximise their leverage when it comes to agreeing a price."

Read that as a warning and as an option, depending on your situation.

The warning: if you are drifting through a slow open-market sale with a stale listing, you become exactly the kind of vendor an investor targets, and you will be negotiated hard. Do not let your home reach that state by accident.

The option: a chain-free cash purchase has genuine value if certainty and speed are what you need — a job move, a divorce, a probate property, a chain that has already collapsed once. The trade is honest and it is a discount. Just know the number before you engage, rather than discovering it at the end. We set out realistic figures in our guides to cash house buyers and what percentage of market value cash buyers pay in 2026. If you go down this route, compare several offers. The spread between the best and worst genuine offer on the same house is routinely five figures.

What about mortgage rates and the October Budget?

Two things sit between now and any recovery in buyer numbers.

The Bank of England held the base rate at 3.75% on 30 July, on a hawkish 6-3 vote with three members preferring a rise to 4.00%. The next decision lands on 17 September. Market pricing has swung around considerably this summer, and lenders have been inconsistent — some trimming selected rates, others reversing earlier cuts. Uswitch's early-August snapshot put the best two- and five-year fixes at 60% loan-to-value around 4.4-4.5%, with market-wide averages materially higher for borrowers with smaller deposits.

The practical consequence for you as a seller: your buyer's borrowing power is not stable. An offer accepted in August on a mortgage in principle issued in July may need re-approving if rates move, and mortgage offers expire. Ask your agent what your buyer's position actually is — deposit, lender, whether the offer is formally issued — rather than accepting "they're proceedable" at face value.

Then there is the Budget in October, the new Chancellor's first. Speculation about property taxation has been running since spring, and Jeremy Leaf named it directly: "Speculation about possible tax changes in the Budget is inevitably weighing on decision-making in a price-sensitive market."

Here is my view, and it is a view rather than a forecast. Budget uncertainty is currently doing more damage to transaction volumes than the tax changes themselves are likely to do to prices. Buyers and sellers alike are waiting for a document nobody has seen, on the assumption it will be bad for them. Some of them will wait until October, read it, and discover it changes nothing about their own move. In the meantime they have lost four months of a market in which they had unusual negotiating room. If your reason for delaying is genuine exposure to a specific rumoured change, wait. If it is generalised nervousness, be honest with yourself about what you are actually waiting for.

Outlook: where do asking prices go from here?

Rightmove's revised forecast — zero to -2% for 2026 as a whole — implies roughly where we already are. Asking prices are 1.0% down annually right now, so the company is effectively saying it expects the rest of the year to be flat-to-slightly-softer rather than a further leg down.

September and October usually bring an autumn bounce in listings and viewings as families return from holidays. This year that bounce meets a market already carrying twelve years' worth of surplus stock. Two forces pulling in opposite directions, and the outcome depends on three things: whether the Bank cuts on 17 September, whether the Budget lands better than feared, and whether the demand uptick since late July holds.

What I would not expect is a rebound in asking prices. Sellers have spent the summer learning that ambitious pricing does not work in this market, and that lesson tends to stick for at least a couple of quarters. The likeliest scenario for autumn is more homes listed at more realistic numbers, slightly more of them selling, and a headline asking price figure that goes broadly sideways.

For a homeowner, that is not a bad market. It is a slow, choosy, well-supplied market in which correctly priced homes with clean paperwork sell in a reasonable time and overpriced ones sit. If you're weighing up whether to hold on for better conditions, be clear that "better" probably means 2027 at the earliest, and that you'd be buying your next home in that same recovered market at a higher price.

What to do this week

• Check your true competition. Search your postcode and count the directly comparable homes currently listed, then check how long each has been on and whether it has reduced.
• Get an evidence-based valuation. Three agents, plus completed-sale data for your street. Ignore the outlier.
• Decide what you're optimising for. Highest possible price and fastest possible sale are different goals requiring different routes. Our guide to selling your house fast sets out what each route realistically delivers.
• Sort your paperwork now, before an offer arrives, not after.
• If speed matters more than the last few percent, get comparable offers in writing so you can see the real spread.

Nobody enjoys reading that the average price tag on a home dropped £7,360 in a month. But an asking price is only ever an opening position, and this month a lot of sellers moved theirs to somewhere a buyer might actually meet them. That is how markets restart.

If you want to see what your home would realistically fetch — on the open market and from chain-free buyers, side by side, with no obligation — compare your options here. It costs nothing and it beats guessing.