London home sellers least likely to find a buyer as UK-wide property sales at highest level in a decade. That’s despite the sale rate across the country being the highest in a decade, with 68 per cent of homes put on the market in the past year finding a buyer.

With London home sellers, however, only 48 per cent of homes for sale sold between June 2020 and June 2021 as buyers fled the capital in a race for space.

The report, from Rightmove, found high-cost boroughs Westminster (22 per cent) Kensington & Chelsea (25 per cent) and Camden (28 per cent) had the lowest sale rate in the country, with the rest of the bottom 10 also in London.
 
At the other end of the scale, Scotland had a sales rate of 89 per cent.
Since 2012, the percentage of London homes selling has been lower than the national average of homes sales.

Rightmove’s Tim Bannister said: “Historically, the chance of finding a buyer has been lower in London, and the contrast to the national average has been exacerbated since 2015 due to the sharp rises in average asking prices for homes.

“The gap has been widened further in 2021 due to multiple factors, such as people moving out of the city in the search for more space and privacy, and the ability to work from home meaning that people are not as reliant on a home near the capital.”

The London sales rate is dragged down by expensive prime inner London, with many of the outer boroughs performing better than the national average as homebuyers traded in smaller homes in convenient locations for more space to work from home.

From June 2020 to June 2021, Bexley saw 74 per cent of homes sold; Havering 69 per cent; and Sutton 68 per cent. Waltham Forest and Barking and Dagenham both recorded property sales of 66 per cent., while Bromley’s average property sales was 64 per cent.

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