How Long to Sell a House in 2026? 42 Days, or 76 in Melton

By Lisa Hayes · 18 August 2026

Zoopla's latest analysis, published today, shows the average British home is taking 42 days to find a buyer — exactly the same as this time last year. But that flat national number is hiding something important: half of Britain's local housing markets have got slower over the past twelve months, and the gap between the quickest and the slowest areas is now the widest it has been in years. In Falkirk you can expect a buyer in 11 days. In Melton, Leicestershire, it takes 76.

If you're thinking about selling this autumn, that spread matters far more to you than any national headline. Your house doesn't sell at the national average. It sells in your postcode, at your price, against whatever else is sitting on Rightmove within a few miles of your front door.

• 42 daysaverage time to find a buyer, Britain (July 2026)
• 180 of 363local authorities where selling got slower over the year
• 76 daysMelton, the slowest market in Britain
• 11 daysFalkirk, the fastest market in Britain

What did Zoopla actually find?

Zoopla looked at 363 local authorities across England, Scotland and Wales and measured how long the average home took to go from listed to sale agreed in the year to July 2026. The national figure came out at 42 days, unchanged year on year.

Underneath that, according to Zoopla, roughly half of those markets — 180 of them — now take longer to sell than they did in July 2025. Another 145 have got faster. Eight areas have crossed the 60-day line, meaning the typical seller there waits two months just to agree a sale, before conveyancing even starts.

So the national average hasn't moved because the slowdown in one half of the country has been cancelled out by an improvement in the other. That's a genuinely different market from the one we had a year ago, even though the headline number says nothing has changed. Averages do that. They smooth over exactly the thing you need to know.

Where are homes selling fastest?

Every single one of the ten fastest markets in Britain is in Scotland. Falkirk leads at 11 days, followed by Renfrewshire and North Lanarkshire at 13. You have to go all the way down to 20th place before a non-Scottish market appears, and when it does it's Carlisle and Barnsley, both at 23 days.

That isn't an accident, and it isn't purely about demand. Scotland sells houses differently. Homes are usually marketed as "offers over" a set figure rather than at an asking price, and — crucially — every seller has to provide a Home Report, which includes a survey and a valuation, before the property goes on the market. Buyers therefore know the condition of the roof and what a surveyor thinks it's worth before they bid, not six weeks after they've had an offer accepted.

Zoopla also points to affordability. Homes in Scotland are simply cheaper relative to local wages, so the pool of people who can actually get a mortgage on them is bigger. Cheaper homes plus more information upfront equals faster sales. It's not complicated, and it's a decent argument for the rest of Britain to look north when the government's homebuying reforms come round again.

Rank	Fastest market	Days to sell	Slowest market	Days to sell
1	Falkirk	11	Melton	76
2	Renfrewshire	13	Westminster	63
3	North Lanarkshire	13	Teignbridge	63
4	South Lanarkshire	14	Torridge	61
5	East Ayrshire	14	Tower Hamlets	60
6	East Renfrewshire	14	Isle of Wight	60
7	West Dunbartonshire	14	Thanet	60
8	Stirling	15	North Devon	60
9	Glasgow City	15	South Norfolk	58
10	Clackmannanshire	16	Elmbridge	58

Source: Zoopla, average time to sell in the year to July 2026.

Where are homes taking longest to sell?

Melton is the outlier, and by some distance. At 76 days it's a full 21 days slower than it was in July 2025 — three extra weeks of waiting, in one year. Nothing else in the table comes close to that rate of deterioration.

After Melton, the top ten slowest markets are entirely in southern England. Westminster and Teignbridge tie at 63 days. Then Torridge, Tower Hamlets, the Isle of Wight, Thanet and North Devon, all at 60 or 61. South Norfolk and Elmbridge round it off at 58. You have to reach 17th place to find the first slow market outside southern England, which is North East Lincolnshire.

The reasons vary by area but they rhyme. Westminster reflects what Zoopla describes as the capital's higher buying costs and higher prices — when the entry ticket is that big, the buyer pool is small and mortgage rates bite harder. Teignbridge, Torridge, North Devon, Thanet and the Isle of Wight are all second-home and coastal-retirement territory, where higher council tax premiums on second properties have taken a chunk of demand out of the market and left buyers with plenty of choice. Tower Hamlets is a flats market, and flats have been the hardest-hit part of the sales market for three years running.

Notice what these places have in common: it's not that they're unpopular. It's that the number of homes on the market has grown faster than the number of people able and willing to buy them.

How big is the gap between neighbouring areas?

This is the part of the Zoopla research that should make you check your own patch rather than the national number.

North West Leicestershire, an improving market well connected to Leicester and Nottingham by the M1, is under an hour's drive from Melton. Homes there sell more than six weeks faster. Same county, same broad economy, wildly different experience if you're the one waiting for a viewing.

Scotland shows the same pattern in reverse. Aberdeenshire takes 45 days — almost five weeks longer than Falkirk, an hour and a half away. Zoopla puts that down to a decade of weak investment in oil and gas suppressing demand around Aberdeen, while Falkirk sits within commuting reach of the central belt's economy.

Six of the eleven regions Zoopla analysed now have a gap of four weeks or more between their fastest and slowest local markets. Wales is the tightest, with about three weeks between best and worst.

• Falkirk 11 days
• Carlisle / Barnsley 23 days
• Britain (average) 42 days
• Aberdeenshire 45 days
• Westminster 63 days
• Melton 76 days

There are also markets moving quickly in the right direction. Barnsley has knocked nearly two weeks off its selling time in a year. Newcastle-under-Lyme has shaved off 11 days. And in London, Waltham Forest is the capital's best-performing borough on time to find a buyer — yet even there, homes are taking eight days longer than they were last summer. When the strongest market in a region is going backwards, that tells you something about the region.

Why has selling slowed in half the country?

Two things, mostly: the cost of borrowing, and the sheer volume of competition.

On borrowing, Zoopla points to average mortgage rates being higher than they were at the start of the year, which has pushed more buyers into a wait-and-see stance. That's confirmed by Rightmove's daily tracker, which had the average two-year fixed rate at 5.09% this month, up from 4.92% in July. The Bank of England has held Bank Rate at 3.75% since the start of the year and held again on 30 July, with the next decision due on 17 September. Fixed rates are priced off swap markets rather than Bank Rate directly, so they can drift up even when the Bank sits still — which is exactly what they've been doing. If you want the terminology unpicked, our property jargon guide covers swaps, LTV and the rest without the waffle.

On competition, Rightmove reported this week that the number of homes for sale is at a 12-year high for this time of year. More stock, fewer active buyers, and the maths does the rest: your home isn't competing against last year's market, it's competing against every other seller in your area who has also decided this is the year to move.

That pressure is now showing up in asking prices. Rightmove's August index recorded a 2.0% monthly drop in new seller asking prices, down £7,360 to £364,999. Prices always dip in August, but the ten-year average August fall is 1.3% — this is the biggest since 2018. Asking prices are now 1.0% below where they were a year ago, the largest annual fall since December 2023. Rightmove has also downgraded its forecast for 2026 as a whole, from a 2% rise to somewhere between flat and a 2% fall. You can track how the various indices compare on our house prices page.

There is a mild counterweight. Rightmove has measured a 5% uptick in buyer demand since Andy Burnham took office on 20 July, against a 2% drop over the same weeks last summer, helped by the new Prime Minister ruling out property tax changes in October's Budget. Buying activity is still running around 10% below last year, so treat the "Burnham bounce" as a stabiliser rather than a recovery. It has stopped things getting worse. It has not made them good.

What does this mean if you're selling?

Three practical consequences.

Your local number is the only one that matters. A national average of 42 days is useless to a seller in Thanet, where the realistic figure is closer to 60 before you add conveyancing. Work backwards from your area's actual time to sell, add ten to fourteen weeks for the legal process, and you have a genuine timeline. If you need to be out by Christmas and your patch runs at 60 days, you needed to be on the market in July.

Overpricing costs more than it used to. In a 15-day market, a punchy asking price gets corrected quickly and cheaply. In a 60-day market, three weeks of no viewings turns into a reduction, and a reduced listing that's been sitting there since August carries a smell buyers can detect. Rightmove's Colleen Babcock made the point directly this week: sellers who price realistically are "statistically proven to be giving themselves the strongest chance of finding a buyer and successfully completing a move." That's a portal talking its own book to some extent, but the data behind it is real.

Chains are more fragile. Longer average selling times mean more links in more chains sitting exposed for longer, and more opportunities for someone three houses up to get cold feet. If your buyer is in a slow market, your sale inherits their risk.

What should you do now?

Start with an honest number for your own home. Not the figure the neighbour swears they were offered, and not the highest of three agent valuations. Look at what has actually sold and completed near you in the last six months, at what condition and at what price. Our guide to how much your house is worth walks through how to do that without paying anyone.

Then find out how long homes like yours are genuinely taking to sell locally. Ask any agent you interview for their average days-to-sale-agreed over the last six months, and their fall-through rate. Both numbers exist. An agent who won't give them to you is telling you something.

Price at, or very slightly under, where the evidence says you'll get viewings in the first fortnight. The first two weeks of a listing are when you get the most eyeballs you will ever get. Wasting them on an aspirational price to "see what happens" is the single most expensive mistake sellers make in a market like this one, and in a 60-day area it can cost you the entire autumn.

Get your paperwork ready before you list, not after you accept an offer. Title deeds, lease details and service charge accounts if it's a flat, guarantees for the boiler and any building work, planning and building regs paperwork for the extension. Scotland's speed advantage is partly just information arriving earlier. You can copy that for free.

And be realistic about what you'll accept. Rightmove flagged a tactic some sellers are using now: if you take a lower offer on your own home, go in lower on your onward purchase and try to make the difference back. In a falling market that arithmetic often works in your favour, because the more expensive property you're buying is the one falling by more in cash terms.

Is it worth waiting for a better market?

Depends entirely on what you're waiting for.

If you're waiting for prices to rebound, the honest answer is that nobody credible is forecasting that this year. Rightmove has just cut its own 2026 forecast to between 0% and -2%. Waiting six months to sell into a market that's flat-to-down, while paying six more months of mortgage interest, is not obviously a winning strategy.

If you're waiting for mortgage rates to ease so that buyers can afford you, there's a more reasonable case. Rightmove has said there are signs of room for some downward movement in fixed rates over the coming weeks, and the Bank meets again on 17 September. Cheaper borrowing widens the buyer pool, which is what a slow market actually needs. But that's a guess about the next few months, not a certainty, and geopolitical wobbles have repeatedly pushed rates the wrong way this year.

The one thing genuinely worth waiting a few weeks for is the autumn selling season. September and October are consistently the second-strongest window of the year after spring, and this year Rightmove thinks the combination of renewed optimism and a Budget that has ruled out property tax changes could make autumn busier than usual. Getting your home listed, photographed and legally prepared in the next fortnight puts you at the front of that queue rather than the back of it.

What if you can't wait 60 days?

Some sales won't tolerate a two-month search for a buyer plus three months of conveyancing. Probate with an empty property racking up council tax and insurance. A divorce settlement with a deadline. A repossession letter. A chain that's already collapsed once and won't survive twice.

In those situations the trade-off is speed against price, and you should walk into it with your eyes open. Genuine cash house buyers can complete in a matter of weeks because they're buying with their own funds and don't need a mortgage offer, a chain or a survey to go their way. What they won't do is pay full market value — the discount is the price of the certainty, and anyone promising you both is either mispricing or about to renegotiate later.

The mistake isn't choosing a quick sale. It's choosing one without knowing what the open-market alternative was actually worth, or accepting the first offer you're given. Our guide to selling your house fast sets out the realistic timescales and the questions to ask before you sign anything. Compare offers. Always compare offers.

The outlook for the rest of 2026

Three things will decide whether the second half of the year is better or worse than the first.

The first is mortgage pricing. At 5.09% for a typical two-year fix, borrowing costs are the main brake on demand. If swap markets soften and lenders start cutting in earnest, time-to-sell in the slower half of the country improves fairly quickly, because a lot of the delay is buyers waiting rather than buyers absent.

The second is the Budget in October. The new Chancellor's first, and the single biggest source of hesitation in the market right now. Burnham has ruled out stamp duty and property tax changes, which removed a specific reason to wait, but "no changes announced yet" is not the same as "no uncertainty" and buyers know it.

The third is supply. Homes for sale are at a 12-year high. Until that stock clears — either by selling or by being withdrawn — sellers are competing hard, and competition shows up in time-to-sell before it shows up in price. If you're seeing plenty of viewings but no offers, that's a pricing signal. If you're seeing no viewings at all, that's a pricing problem you already have.

The direction of travel through 2026 has been consistent: prices broadly flat to slightly down, transactions grinding, and the difference between a good sale and a bad one coming down almost entirely to how the property was priced and prepared on day one. This week's Zoopla numbers just make the local dimension of that impossible to ignore.

The bottom line

Forty-two days is a fact about Britain. It is not a fact about your house. If you live in one of the 180 local authorities that have slowed over the past year, plan for longer, price for reality, and get your paperwork done before the photographer arrives. If you live in one of the 145 that have sped up, you're in a stronger position than the national headlines suggest — but only if you price to convert the interest you get in the first fortnight.

Either way, the worst outcome is drifting: listed high, no viewings, a reduction in October, another in November, and a sale in February at less than you'd have got in September. That's the pattern a slow market punishes, and it's entirely avoidable.

If you want to see what your home is genuinely worth to different types of buyer before you commit to anything, compare offers side by side. It costs nothing, there's no obligation, and knowing the number is the difference between choosing a route and being pushed down one.