Landlords Now Pay Just 88.7% of Asking Price: Seller's Guide

By Lisa Hayes · 28 August 2026

The average landlord buying a home in Great Britain in July paid 88.7% of the initial asking price — and more than half of all investor offers came in at least 10% below what the seller was asking, according to new analysis from Hamptons using Connells Group data. That is the highest share of deep-discount bids since the first Covid lockdown in April 2020. If you are selling right now, the practical message is blunt: a chunk of the buyer pool has worked out that you are more motivated than you were a year ago, and they are pricing accordingly.

What actually happened?

Hamptons, working from Connells Group transaction data, looked at what buy-to-let investors offered and what sellers accepted during July 2026. The headline figure is that 88.7% — the average proportion of the original asking price that a landlord actually handed over.

Put that in pounds. On a home marketed at £300,000, 88.7% is £266,100. That is £33,900 off the sticker price. On £400,000 it is £45,200. These are not rounding errors or the usual bit of haggling at the end of a viewing. They are structural discounts, and they are being agreed.

• 88.7%of asking price paid by the average landlord, July 2026
• 56%of investor offers 10%+ below asking — highest since April 2020
• 27%of those deep-discount offers accepted (18% in July 2025)
• 14.1%of all GB home purchases made by landlords in July

The trend line matters as much as the number. The share of investor offers landing 10% or more below asking went from 45% in July 2025, to 48% in June 2026, to 56% in July 2026. That is not a blip. It is an escalation, and it happened over a single month.

Owner-occupiers, for comparison, are far more polite. Only 25% of first-time buyer offers and 27% of home-mover offers came in more than 10% below the first asking price. So the aggression is specific to investors — people buying with a spreadsheet rather than a heart.

Why are investors suddenly bidding so low?

Because they can. Three things have handed them the leverage.

One: sellers outnumber buyers by a wide margin. Rightmove reported that the number of homes available for sale sits at a 12-year high for this time of year, and that average asking prices for newly listed homes fell 2% in August — a drop of £7,360, to £364,999, and the largest August fall since 2018. When there are that many properties chasing a thin pool of buyers, every seller is negotiating against a hundred alternatives.

Two: mainstream buyers have less money. Zoopla's August index put the squeeze in plain terms — average five-year fixed rates have climbed from below 4% in January to around 4.8%, which means someone who could afford a £200,000 mortgage in January can now borrow roughly £182,000 for the same monthly payment. That is a 9% cut in buying power across the board. Every buyer who quietly drops out of your price bracket makes the investor's offer look more reasonable by comparison.

Three: certainty has become the scarce commodity. This is the one sellers underrate. A cash, chain-free investor is not waiting on a mortgage valuation, is not waiting on someone else's sale in Wolverhampton, and is not going to renegotiate in week nine because a survey found damp. In a market where chains are collapsing and sales are dragging on for months, that reliability has a price — and the investor is charging you for it.

"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." — David Fell, lead analyst at Hamptons

Fell's point about liquidity shows up directly in the numbers. Where landlords were buying with cash, 63% of offers in England and Wales came in at least 10% under asking. The more cash you bring, the harder you push. It is not personal; it is arithmetic.

The regional picture: where are lowball offers actually landing?

Here is where it gets interesting, and where the national average misleads. The South of England — excluding London — is the epicentre. The South East saw 70% of investor offers come in at least 10% below the first asking price, the highest share in the country. The South West followed at 60%.

But making a low offer and getting it accepted are different things. This table shows the gap between the two.

Region	Share of investor offers 10%+ below asking	Share of agreed deals that were 10%+ below asking
South East	70%	54%
South West	60%	44%
North East	—	32%
London	—	16%

London is the outlier, and not in the way most people assume. Despite a genuinely tough market in the capital — asking prices there fell 4.4% in August, and available stock is at a 16-year high — only 16% of agreed deals came in 10% or more below asking. London sellers are, by some margin, the least likely in the country to accept a big discount.

Read that carefully, because it cuts both ways. It might mean London sellers have deeper pockets and more patience. It might equally mean they are sitting on unsold homes rather than dealing with reality. Kensington and Chelsea sellers, according to the same August data, knocked their average asking price down from £1,648,148 to £1,552,970 in a single month — roughly £95,000 — which suggests the resistance eventually breaks, it just breaks through the asking price rather than through the negotiation.

In the South East, by contrast, 54% of everything agreed with an investor was struck at 10% or more below asking. If you are selling in Kent, Surrey, Sussex or Hampshire, that is your market. It is not a warning about what might happen. It is a description of what is already happening to your neighbours.

Why flat owners are taking the biggest hit

The single sharpest number in the Hamptons research is this: sellers of leasehold properties accepted 41% of the discounted offers put to them, against 27% across all sellers.

Flat owners are being squeezed from several directions at once. Demand for apartments has been weaker than for houses for a while. Service charges and ground rents have risen hard. Building safety documentation still slows or kills sales in blocks over 11 metres. Lenders remain fussy about short leases and cladding. And the investors who traditionally bought flats have themselves been thinned out by tax changes, so the ones still buying know they are one of very few options.

If you own a flat and you are trying to sell in 2026, you should assume your negotiating position is weaker than the national averages imply. That is not defeatism — it is the thing you need to know before you decide whether to hold, cut your price, or take a guaranteed offer. Understanding the terms being used against you helps here; our property jargon explained guide covers the leasehold vocabulary that tends to appear right when the price is being renegotiated.

The 45-day number every seller should know

Buried in the Hamptons analysis is the most useful line in the whole report. The average time on the market before a seller accepted an investor offer within 10% of the asking price was 45 days.

Roughly six weeks. That is your window.

The willingness to accept a lower offer, Hamptons found, correlates with how long a home has been on the market. Which is common sense dressed up as data, but it has a hard practical edge: every week your listing sits there, your negotiating position gets measurably worse. Portals show reduction history. Agents talk. Investors specifically screen for properties that have been listed a long time, because a long listing is a proxy for a motivated seller.

So the expensive mistake in this market is not accepting a low offer. It is testing a high price for three months, then accepting a low offer anyway — with a reduction history now attached to your listing that guarantees the next buyer starts lower still. You end up in the same place, four months later, with less leverage.

If you are approaching that six-week mark with no offers, the price is the message. Get an honest read on where your home actually sits — our guide on how much your house is worth and current house price data will tell you more than a hopeful agent's valuation will.

Is a below-asking offer actually a bad deal?

Not automatically, no. And this is where I want to push back on the way this story is being reported elsewhere.

Most coverage of the Hamptons figures frames it as landlords "preying" on sellers. That is good copy and lazy analysis. The real question is not "how does this offer compare to my asking price?" It is "how does this offer compare to my realistic net outcome on the open market, after costs, after time, and after the risk the sale falls through?"

Those are very different questions, because the asking price was never a real number. In July, TwentyCi analysis put the gap between average asking prices and achievable values at 11.6%. If your asking price is 11.6% above what the home is worth, an offer at 88.7% of asking is not an 11.3% discount. It is roughly market value.

Now add the things people forget to count. Around 23.7% of UK sales collapsed before completion in the first quarter of 2026. Six in ten sales are now taking more than six months to exchange. Half the homes leaving estate agents' books in 2026 withdrew unsold. Every month you keep the property is another month of mortgage interest, council tax, insurance, and — if you have already committed to somewhere else — bridging or rent.

The honest version is that a fast, certain sale at a discount is a legitimate product. Plenty of people rationally choose it. What is not legitimate is being pushed into it without knowing what the alternatives were — or accepting a discount from one buyer when a different buyer would have paid meaningfully more for the same speed and certainty. That is the whole reason for comparing cash house buyers against each other rather than taking the first number you are given.

What this means if you're selling right now

Four things follow from the data.

Your asking price is now a negotiating position, not a valuation. With supply at a 12-year high and buyer budgets down 9%, an ambitious price no longer "leaves room for negotiation" — it filters you out of search results entirely. Rightmove has downgraded its 2026 forecast to somewhere between flat and minus 2%, and Zoopla has cut its own to a 1% rise. Nobody credible is forecasting the growth that would rescue an overpriced listing.

Investors are a bigger part of your buyer pool than you think. At 14.1% of all purchases, roughly one in seven buyers in July was a landlord. If you are selling a two-bed flat, an ex-rental, or anything in the lower half of your local market, that proportion is likely higher. Some of your viewings are investors. Price and present accordingly.

The North–South divide is doing real work. Northern Ireland at +7.4% annually, Scotland at +3.6%, Wales at +1.6% — while southern England is where the deep discounts are being agreed. Advice built on the national average will be wrong for most people. Where you are selling changes the answer more than anything else on this list.

Certainty is worth money, and you should be the one pricing it. Investors are charging you 11.3% for chain-free speed. That is their number, set to their advantage. There is no rule that says it is the right number, and there are plenty of buyers — including regulated quick-sale firms — who will quote you a different one for the same certainty.

What to do in the next 30 days

If you are already on the market and it has been quiet:

• Count the days. Work out exactly how long you have been listed. If you are past 45 days with no offers, you are in the zone where investors start circling and sellers start capitulating. Act before the market acts on you.
• Get a second and third valuation. Not from the agent who has your instruction and an incentive to tell you what you want to hear. Start with a free house valuation and compare it against recent sold prices on your street, not asking prices.
• Make one decisive price move, not three small ones. A drip of 2% cuts every six weeks broadcasts desperation and stacks up a reduction history that every buyer can see. One meaningful adjustment that puts you back in front of a new set of search results does far more.
• Fix the paperwork now, not at offer stage. Lease details, service charge accounts, building safety forms, planning certificates, guarantees. Six in ten sales now take over six months to exchange, and a large part of that is documents nobody gathered until week eight. Missing paperwork is also the excuse a buyer uses to renegotiate in month four.

If you have received a low offer and don't know what to do with it:

• Do the net-net maths. Take the offer, subtract your costs. Then take your hoped-for open-market price, subtract agent fees, subtract six more months of mortgage and bills, and apply a realistic discount for the chance it falls through. Compare those two numbers, not the two headline prices.
• Ask who the buyer is and where the money is. A cash investor with proof of funds is a genuinely different proposition to a "cash buyer" who is actually waiting on a bridging facility. Ask for evidence. The good ones will produce it immediately.
• Get a competing quote before you answer. Never negotiate against a single offer. Comparing the best house buying companies takes an afternoon and is the cheapest leverage available to you.
• Be honest about your deadline. If you don't have one, say no and wait. If you do, factor the cost of missing it into what speed is genuinely worth to you.

And if speed is the actual priority rather than a nice-to-have, our guide on how to sell your house fast sets out the realistic timescales and trade-offs for each route, including where the hidden costs sit.

What happens next?

Two forces are pulling in opposite directions this autumn, and how they resolve will decide whether investor leverage grows or fades.

Pulling towards more discounting: supply stays high, the Autumn Budget keeps property-tax speculation alive, and the Bank of England held Bank Rate at 3.75% on 30 July with three of nine MPC members actually voting to raise it to 4%. That vote split is the underappreciated detail of the summer. The market has spent a year assuming the next move is down; a meaningful minority of the committee thinks it should be up. The Bank next meets on 17 September.

Pulling the other way: buyer searches are up 7% year-on-year — the strongest annual increase in twelve months, led by the South East at +8.9% and the East of England at +8.5%. Sales agreed are still 6% below last year but the gap is closing. Lenders including Nationwide, Santander and HSBC have trimmed selected fixed rates through August as swap rates eased. Four out of five homes that have sold in 2026 did so without ever needing a price reduction, which is a reminder that correctly-priced homes are still selling perfectly well.

My read: the discounting story is really a pricing story wearing a disguise. Investors are not extracting 11.3% because sellers are weak. They are extracting it because a large number of homes were listed at prices set in a warmer market and their owners have not adjusted. The homes selling smoothly in 2026 — that four-in-five figure — are the ones priced for the market that exists rather than the one people remember. Get the price right and the investor with the cheeky offer becomes just one bidder among several, rather than your only option.

The seasonal factor cuts the same way. Late August and early September traditionally bring a wave of asking-price reductions as sellers reset for the autumn market. If you are going to move your price, moving it now — in the same window as everyone else, before the run-up to the Budget — is better than moving it in November when the market has already formed a view about your property.

The bottom line

Landlords paying 88.7% of asking is a genuinely striking number, and it deserves attention. But it is not evidence that homes are worth 11.3% less than they were. It is evidence that asking prices have drifted ahead of reality, that certainty has become genuinely valuable, and that the buyers who understand both of those things are being rewarded for it.

You can be rewarded for understanding them too. Price honestly, prepare your paperwork before you need it, watch the 45-day clock, and never respond to a below-asking offer without knowing what a competing buyer would pay for the same speed.

If you are weighing a quick sale against holding out on the open market, the most useful thing you can do is see the actual numbers side by side rather than argue with an asking price. Compare offers from regulated cash buyers — it costs nothing, it commits you to nothing, and it turns "is this a fair offer?" into a question you can answer with evidence instead of a hunch.