Sales Agreed Fall 5.4%: What Autumn 2026 Sellers Must Know

By Lisa Hayes · 15 September 2026

Fewer homes are getting sold this year than last, and the gap has been widening since May. TwentyCi's latest Market Update shows the number of properties reaching sales agreed has fallen by more than 5% year-on-year for four consecutive months, and the consultancy has cut its full-year forecast to 1.16 million residential transactions for 2026. If you are thinking of selling this autumn, that matters more than any house price headline: the pool of buyers willing to actually commit has shrunk, while the number of homes competing for them has hit its highest level in a decade.

• -5.4%sales agreed, Jan–Aug 2026 vs 2025
• 1.16mTwentyCi's 2026 transaction forecast
• -3.9%versus the 1.21m sold in 2025
• +2.1%new listings year-on-year — a 10-year high

What exactly has TwentyCi reported?

TwentyCi tracks property listings and sales in near real time, which makes it one of the more useful early-warning systems in the UK market. Its September Market Update, reported by Estate Agent Today on 15 September, found that sales agreed volumes fell roughly 8% year-on-year in both May and June, then 5% in July and 6% in August. Four months in a row of declines north of 5%. Across the first eight months of 2026, sales agreed are down 5.4% compared with the same period last year.

The forecast has been trimmed to match. TwentyCi now expects 1.16 million residential transactions across 2026. That is 3.9% below the 1.21 million recorded in 2025, though still 5.6% above the 2024 total. So this is a market cooling from a recovery, not collapsing from a boom.

And at the same time, supply keeps climbing. TwentyCi data shows newly listed properties running 2.1% higher year-on-year, at the highest level it has recorded in the past ten years.

Put those two facts side by side and you have the defining condition of the autumn 2026 market. More sellers. Fewer completed deals. That is not a pricing problem you can solve by being patient. It is a competition problem.

Why "sales agreed" tells you more than the transaction figures

Here is where a lot of the commentary this week has gone wrong, and it is worth slowing down on.

There are two ways to count a housing market. You can count completions — deals that have legally finished, which HMRC publishes monthly. Or you can count sales agreed — offers accepted, the moment a buyer and seller shake hands.

Those two numbers are currently telling opposite stories. HMRC recorded 5% year-on-year growth in residential transactions in July, although transactions remain 2.5% lower year-to-date compared with 2025. Read the July completions figure on its own and you would conclude the market is picking up.

It isn't. Completions are a rear-view mirror. A sale that completed in July was very likely agreed in March or April, given how long UK conveyancing now takes. The sales agreed data is the windscreen, and it has been showing declines every month since May.

"Buyer demand has fallen by more than 5% year-on-year in every month since May, and that sustained weakness will inevitably feed through into completed transactions with a lag," says Colin Bradshaw, chief executive at TwentyCi. "For mortgage lenders, this is an important signal that the apparent resilience in headline transaction volumes should not be taken as an indication that the market is strengthening."

That is a polite way of saying: don't be fooled by July. Bradshaw is talking to lenders, but the warning applies equally to homeowners. If you list your home this month on the assumption that the market is warming up because the completion figures looked decent, you are pricing against data that is five months out of date.

The four-month slide, month by month

The shape of the decline is as interesting as its size. It did not deteriorate steadily. It arrived abruptly in May and has stayed put.

• May -8%
• June -8%
• July -5%
• August -6%

Year-on-year change in sales agreed volumes, according to TwentyCi. Bar length shows the size of the fall.

Four months is long enough to rule out a blip. It is also long enough to rule out the two explanations the industry reached for over the summer — the weather and the school holidays. Neither of those happens in May and June.

What did happen from May onwards was a steady drip of fiscal speculation about property, a run of uncomfortable inflation prints, and a mortgage market that stopped falling and started climbing. Buyers didn't disappear. They stopped signing.

Mortgage pricing is moving, and the Bank of England isn't driving it

This is the part most sellers get wrong, so it is worth being blunt about it.

The Bank of England's base rate has been 3.75% since the 30 July decision, and the Monetary Policy Committee announces again this Thursday, 17 September. Plenty of homeowners are treating that meeting as the event that decides what happens to their buyer's mortgage. It isn't.

Fixed-rate mortgages are priced off swap rates — the wholesale cost to a lender of locking in money for two or five years — and those have been rising independently of Bank Rate. TwentyCi points directly at this: renewed volatility in financial markets is putting pressure on mortgage pricing, with rising swap rates driven by the global bond market sell-off, higher oil prices and renewed inflation concerns already prompting some lenders to increase fixed-rate pricing despite no change in Bank Rate.

Read that again. Lenders have been putting fixed rates up while the base rate stood still. So if you are waiting for a rate cut to unlock your sale, you may be waiting for the wrong lever. A quarter-point cut on Thursday would be welcome, and it would help sentiment, but it would not automatically hand your buyer a cheaper five-year fix. That depends on the bond market, and the bond market is not in a generous mood.

There is a practical consequence here. Every buyer with a mortgage offer is sitting on a ticking clock, usually three to six months. In a market where rates are creeping up, that offer is the most valuable thing your buyer owns, because the replacement will probably cost more. It makes them cautious about committing — and it makes them extremely intolerant of delay once they have. Both of those work against a slow, drawn-out sale.

What the price indices are actually saying

You will have seen contradictory house price headlines over the past fortnight, because the major indices are genuinely disagreeing with each other. That is normal in a flat market: when real movement is close to zero, methodology differences dominate.

Index	Latest reading	Annual change
Lloyds (formerly Halifax), August	£298,468	-0.4%
Nationwide, August	£275,465	+1.6%
Rightmove asking prices, August	£364,999	-1.0%

The Lloyds House Price Index for August put the average UK property at £298,468, down 0.2% on the month and 0.4% on the year — the first annual fall since November 2023. Nationwide's August index had the average at £275,465, up 0.2% on the month and 1.6% on the year. Rightmove's August index showed new sellers' asking prices down 2.0% on the month, a £7,360 drop, to £364,999.

Three different numbers, three different methods. Lloyds and Nationwide both measure their own mortgage approvals, so they capture agreed prices for mortgaged purchases, and they weight property types differently. Rightmove measures asking prices, which is what sellers hope to get, not what buyers pay. None of them is wrong. They are answering slightly different questions.

The honest summary is that UK house prices are flat with a slight downward tilt, and the national average is close to meaningless for your particular street. What is unambiguous is the direction of activity, and that is what TwentyCi has just documented.

Worth keeping in perspective, too. Andrew Asaam, mortgages director at Lloyds, made the point that average house prices remain around 25% higher than they were at the end of 2019, despite the substantial increase to interest rates seen over recent years. He also noted that what the bank is not seeing is a rush of homeowners cutting prices — more are choosing to sit tight, with sellers reluctant to accept offers they feel are too low while some buyers wait to see how conditions develop.

That standoff is the thing. It is precisely why sales agreed volumes are falling while prices are barely moving. Both sides have decided to wait, and waiting produces no transactions.

The regional picture: a genuinely two-speed country

National figures are hiding an unusually wide spread this year. On Lloyds' August data, annual growth ran strongest in Northern Ireland at 6.9%, followed by Scotland at 3.5%, the North East at 2.7% and the North West at 2.0%. The falls were concentrated in the south: the South East down 1.6%, Greater London down 1.5%, and both the South West and Eastern England down 1.2%.

The mechanism is affordability. Where prices are highest, a given mortgage rate does the most damage, because the buyer is borrowing more. A move from 4% to 5% on a £450,000 loan in Surrey removes far more buying power than the same move on a £160,000 loan in Sunderland. So the south absorbs rate pressure as price weakness, and the north and Scotland, starting from lower multiples of income, keep grinding upwards.

If you are selling in the North West, Scotland or Northern Ireland, your local market is probably in better shape than the national headlines suggest. If you are in the South East, London or the eastern counties, it is probably worse, and the "average UK house price fell 0.4%" line is understating what your buyers are seeing. Check how long comparable homes near you have actually been listed before you trust any national figure.

What this means if you're selling this autumn

Strip out the noise and there are three things a seller needs to take from this week's data.

One: there are more homes for sale than at any point in a decade, and fewer buyers signing. Your home is not being judged in isolation. It is being judged against everything else on the portal within your buyer's search radius and budget. Listings up 2.1%, sales agreed down 5.4% — that is the arithmetic of a buyer's market, whatever anyone says about prices holding up.

Two: the buyers who are active are "need to move" buyers, not "want to move" buyers. That changes their behaviour. They are less romantic about a property, more forensic about condition, and far more sensitive to anything that threatens their timeline or their mortgage offer. They will negotiate. They will also walk away from complications rather than work through them.

Three: time on market is now your biggest financial risk, not your asking price. This is counterintuitive and it is the thing most sellers get backwards. An overambitious asking price does not simply mean you eventually accept less. It means you spend three months collecting no offers, your listing goes stale, your buyer pool has already seen and dismissed you, and when you do finally cut, the reduction reads as desperation rather than realism. Meanwhile the market underneath you has drifted slightly lower and mortgage rates have nudged slightly higher.

The cost of getting the price wrong at launch has gone up, because the market no longer gives you a second wave of fresh buyers to rescue you.

What to do now: seven practical moves

None of this requires you to panic. It does require you to be deliberate.

• Price to the last three months, not to last year. Ask any agent valuing your home to show you what has actually sold and completed nearby since June, not what is currently listed. Listings are aspiration. Completions are fact. Our guide to working out what your house is genuinely worth walks through how to do this properly.
• Treat the first three weeks as the whole campaign. Your listing gets its biggest burst of attention the moment it appears, because every registered buyer in your area gets alerted at once. If the price is wrong, you burn that audience and never get it back. Get it right before you go live, not after.
• Get your paperwork ready before you list, not after you accept an offer. Title deeds, FENSA certificates, building regulations sign-offs, guarantees, lease details if you are leasehold, management pack if there is a service charge. Every one of these is a fortnight of delay if it surfaces late, and in a market where buyers have rate-locked mortgage offers, delay kills sales.
• Be honest with yourself about chain risk. With sales agreed down and transactions taking longer, a long chain is a genuine hazard rather than a theoretical one. If your buyer is four links down a chain and one link has a leasehold flat with a short lease, your completion date is not in your control. Read up on what to do when a chain starts to wobble before it does.
• Take offers seriously, even the cheeky ones. In this market an offer is not an opening bid in a long negotiation. It is a live buyer with finance, and there may not be another one for two months. That does not mean accept anything. It means engage properly rather than dismissing on principle.
• Fix the things that stop a mortgage valuation dead. Damp, visible structural cracks, Japanese knotweed, an unsafe electrical installation, a lease under 80 years. These do not reduce your price — they remove your buyer's ability to borrow at all, which is worse. Deal with them or disclose them upfront and price accordingly.
• Know what your fallback actually is. If your move is time-sensitive — a job, a separation, probate, a chain you must not lose — then "wait for a better market" is not a strategy, it is a hope. Understand what a genuine cash buyer or an assisted sale would actually pay and how fast they would complete, so you are comparing real options rather than guessing.

Should you sell now or wait until spring?

I get asked this every week, and the honest answer is that it depends entirely on why you are moving — but the data does lean one way.

The case for waiting: if the Bank of England cuts on Thursday and again before Christmas, and if inflation behaves, mortgage pricing could ease into the new year and bring buyers back. Spring is traditionally the strongest selling season. Nationwide still has annual growth positive. You might sell into a slightly better market.

The case against waiting: the swap rate pressure TwentyCi highlights is not about Bank Rate, so a cut may not deliver the mortgage relief people expect. Supply is already at a ten-year high and every seller who waits for spring adds to it, which means more competition, not less. The Autumn Budget brings another round of property tax speculation, which has already been enough to freeze buyers once this year. And if you wait for spring, you are not selling in March — you are listing in March and completing in July, given current timescales.

My view: if you need to move within the next twelve months, waiting buys you very little and costs you the one advantage you currently hold, which is that this autumn's buyer pool is small but motivated. If your move is entirely discretionary and your mortgage is on a comfortable fix, there is no great urgency, and sitting out a soft patch is a perfectly reasonable choice. Just make it a decision rather than a drift.

What to watch between now and Christmas

Four things will decide whether this slide flattens out or deepens.

Thursday's Bank of England decision, and more importantly the vote split and the language. A cut helps sentiment. But watch how many members wanted to hold or raise, because that tells you what markets will price in for the rest of the year, and markets are what set fixed mortgage rates.

Swap rates and lender pricing. This is the number that actually reaches your buyer. If fixed rates keep drifting up through October, expect sales agreed to stay weak regardless of what the base rate does.

The Autumn Budget. Property taxation has been the subject of sustained speculation all year, including reports about the high value council tax surcharge and how homes will be valued for it. Whatever is or isn't announced, the speculation itself suppresses activity, because buyers and sellers both postpone decisions until they know the rules. Expect a quiet few weeks beforehand and a clearer picture afterwards.

Whether sales agreed data improves in September and October. This is the single most important indicator for sellers, and it is the one nobody reports. If TwentyCi's next update shows the year-on-year decline narrowing, the autumn market is stabilising. If it shows another 6% to 8% fall, 2027 will open softer than this year did.

The bottom line

The story of autumn 2026 is not a house price crash. Prices are drifting, not falling off a cliff, and the average home is still worth roughly a quarter more than it was before the pandemic. The story is that it has become materially harder to get a sale agreed and see it through, because there are more homes on the market than at any point in ten years and the buyers looking at them are fewer, more cautious and more exposed to mortgage pricing they cannot control.

That is a solvable problem, but not by waiting. It is solved by pricing honestly, preparing thoroughly, and knowing in advance what you will do if the open market does not deliver in the timeframe you need.

If you are weighing up your options, it is worth seeing what the different routes would actually pay you and how quickly they would complete before you commit to any of them. You can compare cash offers for your property with no obligation, and compare that against a standard open-market sale or a faster guided sale. Knowing the real numbers for your own home beats guessing from a national average every time.