Why Flats Aren’t Selling 2026 & What You Can Do

Your flat has been on the market since spring. Two viewings, no offers, and an agent who keeps steering the conversation back to price.

So you assume it’s you. The photos, the agent, or ten grand on the asking price?

In 2026 it usually isn’t any of those. Zoopla data reported by the Guardian in August found 80.5% of flats listed failed to find a buyer within six months. In London it was 87%. Across all property types, the figure is around half.

We buy more than 500 properties a year for cash across England and Wales, and flats have been noticeably tougher to shift since 2020. Around 40% of the enquiries that reach us involve a problem tenant, a short lease or poor condition.

So here is what actually stalls a flat, in the order a lender meets the problems: the lease, the service charge, the paperwork, and the valuation. Price is the last lever, not the first.

Your buyer can borrow. The lender won’t take your flat.

Buyer affordability has actually been loosening. The Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee recommended easing the loan-to-income flow limit in July 2025, letting individual lenders go beyond the old cap on lending at 4.5 times income and potentially supporting up to 36,000 extra high loan-to-income mortgages a year. First-time buyers made up 54% of that high-LTI lending in the second quarter of 2025.

What has tightened is the lender’s appetite for the flat itself as security. Your buyer passes. The flat fails.

That happens when the valuer or the lender sees:

• a lease under about 85 years

• a service charge at or above 1% of the flat’s value

• an unresolved building safety position

• a ground rent review or doubling clause

• commercial premises below, like a takeaway or a barber’s

• a block with a weak resale record, which comes back as a down-valuation

Propertymark’s July 2026 survey of leaseholders and member agents found that more than half of agents who had struggled to sell a cladding-affected flat said the blocker was a lender refusing to lend, not a buyer changing their mind.

Diagnose before you discount.

Lease length: the 80-year cliff and the 85-year walk-away

The lender tests the lease first, so you should too.

Most mainstream lenders want roughly 70 to 85 years remaining when the buyer applies, and 30 to 35 years still left when the mortgage term ends. Below about 70 years you are into specialist lenders, much bigger deposits and a far smaller buyer pool.

Around one in five of the flats we are asked to offer on has a short lease. In my experience the number where ordinary buyers start backing away is 85, not 80, because that is where their broker starts warning them about lending.

Eighty years is where it stops being awkward and starts being expensive. Below 80 years remaining, marriage value applies: the freeholder is entitled to roughly half the uplift in value that extending creates. The same extension costs far more at 79 years than it did at 81.

First job: get the exact remaining term in writing from the lease itself, not from what you remember at purchase.

Extend before you list, or price it in? My rule

The two loudest voices disagree here. Zoopla’s Richard Donnell suggests considering an extension before listing once you are under 85 years. ValuQ argues the cleaner route is often to price the extension in and let the buyer do it.

Both can be right. My rule:

• Above 90 years: do nothing. Publish the term in the listing so nobody has to ask.

• 80 to 90 years: don’t extend. Get a formal valuation of the extension cost, publish it, and take it off your price. Buyers fear an unknown number far more than a known one.

• Below 80 years: extend if you can wait, because marriage value means the discount buyers demand grows faster than the cost of fixing it. If you can’t wait, expect a cash buyer.

Never guess the deduction. A guessed number invites a bigger one back. LEASE, the government-funded Leasehold Advisory Service, is the free place to start.

The ten-second service charge test

Here is the number almost nobody tells sellers about.

Divide your annual service charge by a realistic value for the flat. If the answer is 1% or more, you have a lending problem before you have a marketing problem, because that is roughly where lenders start restricting or refusing.

You will see a lower figure elsewhere. Zoopla puts a typical charge nearer £1,900 a year plus around £200 of ground rent. Different samples, different periods, so treat £1,900 to £2,400 as the honest national range, then ignore both figures. The only number that matters is yours divided by your value.

Steep charges shrink the buyer pool. The exception is a luxury block with a concierge, gym or pool, where buyers expect high charges as part of the package. There are simply far fewer of those buyers, so even there the market is thin.

Ground rent can do more damage than service charge, because it can make the flat unmortgageable outright. Over £250 a year outside London, or over £1,000 inside London, and ordinary buyers struggle. Some doubling clauses have the same effect. At that point your realistic market is cash.

Do not wait for reform on this one. The Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 did not cap ground rents on existing leases. A £250 cap, falling to a peppercorn after 40 years, is only a proposal in the draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill, and even if it passes in that form it is not expected in force until late 2028. No use to you this year.

Order the management pack before you list, not when an offer lands

When we buy a flat for cash, four to six weeks from agreed offer to completion is ambitious but realistic. The one thing that reliably breaks that timeline is the managing agent or freeholder being slow to issue the leasehold management pack.

That is on a purchase with no chain and no lender. On the open market it is worse, because the buyer’s solicitor only orders the pack after the offer is agreed.

The pack comes from the managing agent or freeholder, who charges for it, and it typically covers:

• two to three years of service charge accounts and the current budget

• the buildings insurance schedule

• planned major works and any Section 20 notices

• the ground rent position and any arrears

• the freeholder’s answers to standard leasehold enquiries

Four weeks of silence while that is produced is normal, and your buyer sits through all of it. They can walk at any stage at no cost. You are the one paying legal fees and pack charges.

So order it the day you decide to sell. Then put the lease term, service charge, ground rent and the last two to three years of accounts straight into the listing, with a line explaining any jump. It is the cheapest and fastest lever you have.

If your block is 11 metres or five storeys and above

Building safety is the second predictable mid-sale delay, and it catches people out because the paperwork is transaction-specific rather than block-wide.

The Building Safety Act 2022 protects qualifying leaseholders in England from most historical remediation costs, but qualification turns on a snapshot of who owned what on 14 February 2022. Proving it needs a Leaseholder Deed of Certificate from you plus a Landlord Certificate from the freeholder, generated for that particular sale.

Two identical flats on the same landing can come out with different status.

If your flat is in Wales, check before you rely on any of this: Wales runs its own building safety scheme, and the leaseholder cost protections above are written for buildings in England.

Don’t wait for the works to finish. Government figures at the end of May 2026 identified 4,411 residential buildings of 11 metres or more in England with unsafe cladding, of which just 38% had completed remediation. Get the certificates in hand instead.

Price against sold prices, then test it in two weeks

Now, and only now, price.

Rightmove found that nearly three-quarters of the homes that sold this year did so without a single reduction, which kills the old tactic of listing high and cutting later. Reductions have also stopped being distinctive: Sprift’s July 2026 data had 31.3% of listings nationally already reduced, rising to 43.6% in the South East, with average time on market at 155 days.

Price against what flats in your own block have actually sold for, not what similar flats are asking. In a stalled market, asking prices are just other people’s mistakes.

Then test it. A well-priced flat in reasonable condition should attract serious interest within two weeks. If it hasn’t by week three, the price is the issue, and every week you leave it, the listing goes staler.

More than 90% of sellers who come to us say overpricing played a part in their property sitting unsold. The one exception is timing: launch just before Christmas or a Budget and give it a couple more weeks before you panic.

London sellers, one extra reality. Plenty of London flats now cost the same as a house just outside London, and a buyer with flexible working takes the house. With so few investors left, first-time buyers are spoilt for choice, which is exactly why the market is so price-sensitive.

Selling with a tenant: the Ground 1A trap

If you are a landlord, the exit route itself has changed.

The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 commenced its tenancy reforms on 1 May 2026. Assured shorthold tenancies and Section 21 are gone. To get vacant possession so you can sell, so you now need Ground 1A, which cannot be relied on until 12 months from the start of the tenancy and needs four months’ notice.

One myth worth killing: you can serve notice before the tenant reaches 12 months. It just cannot expire any earlier than the end of month 12, so notice can go out from around month eight.

The trap is what happens next. Once you use Ground 1A, a 12-month re-letting restriction bites. If your buyer pulls out, you are holding an empty flat you cannot re-let, with no rent coming in and the same unsold flat you started with.

That is why a certain sale is worth more to a landlord in 2026 than it used to be. The alternative is selling with the tenant in place, to a cash buyer or investor like Property Rescue: no notice, no void, no restriction.

Either way, have your gas safety and electrical reports ready. When we buy from a landlord we expect satisfactory reports for both. If they cannot be provided we may carry out our own checks, and the findings are reflected in the price we offer.

Should you wait, withdraw and relist, or hold out for reform?

Most stalled sellers are quietly betting on next year. Here are the numbers to bet with.

Savills revised its mainstream forecast on 1 June 2026 to minus 2.0% for 2026 and plus 2.5% for 2027. Halifax has 1% to 3% for 2026 and Zoopla around 1.5%. Nobody credible is forecasting a crash.

But flats are not the whole market. Zoopla’s July 2026 index had flats and maisonettes down 1.7% year on year at an average £192,200, while semi-detached homes rose 1.9%. Waiting for the market to recover does not mean flats recover with it.

Reform will not rescue you either. The Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 will abolish marriage value and give 990-year extensions at a peppercorn rent, but it arrives piecemeal through secondary legislation and is not yet in force, so marriage value is still payable today. A freeholder challenge to the marriage value change is heading to the Court of Appeal, with a hearing not expected before spring 2027, and there is no firm date for when leaseholders will be able to rely on the change. Any lease extension you start now is valued under the current rules, marriage value included.

Withdrawing over winter and relisting can work, but only if you use the gap. Rightmove’s analysis of millions of listings found February and March are the best months to list, with 66.3% of those homes going on to complete, and February ties with January as the quickest to find a buyer at 51 days. That covers all property types, though, and no month fixes an 82-year lease.

Relist the same flat with the same unanswered questions and you will get February’s version of the same silence.

The real risk is not a crash. It is another year of a shortening lease, another service charge rise, and standing still while houses move.

When the open market still won’t move it

Some flats cannot be fixed in the time you have. A 68-year lease. An open cladding question. A service charge at 1.4% of value. In those cases a mortgage-dependent buyer was never going to complete, and you are choosing between three routes.

1. A direct cash sale. This removes the lender from the transaction, so the lease term or cladding position stops being disqualifying. We pay 80% of market value for houses and 75% for flats, and below £150,000 the percentage varies with value. Flats get less because they are harder to resell: in Bournemouth we found 132 flats for sale inside a quarter of a single postcode.

You get an offer within 24 hours, exchange in as little as 48 hours, and completion in four to six weeks on a flat because of the pack. We cover your conveyancing fees if you use our recommended solicitor, and you can pull out any time before exchange. That is what a fast cash sale actually looks like on a flat.

2. An assisted sale. If you are not against a deadline, we can pitch your flat to our investor pool and, where it suits, take it to auction on your behalf, at no cost to you. That typically achieves 90% or more of market value. The trade is certainty: it is not guaranteed and there is no fixed timescale, so it only suits sellers who do not need a sale within 28 days.

3. Let it, or withdraw and fix it. Often the right answer. Just cost it honestly: void periods, compliance, another year of service charge, and if you have already served Ground 1A, that 12-month re-letting restriction. And that’s not even getting started on the tax liability. UK landlords pay income tax on their net rental profits rather than their gross rental income. Your net property profit is combined with your other personal income for the tax year. So if you’re current tax bracket is 40%, good luck turning a profit.

If you have plenty time and no real pressure, a cash sale probably is not right for you, and I would tell you that on the phone. Order the pack, get the lease term in writing, sort the certificates, and go back to the market properly priced. For most flats, that is the whole fix. Otherwise, give us a call.

This article is general information about selling property in England and Wales, not legal or financial advice. Lease extension, building safety obligations and possession proceedings are complex, so take advice from a solicitor or qualified adviser on your own circumstances. Because of our Sale and Rent Back service, we’re one of the only house buying companies in the UK that’s regulated by the FCA (FCA Register 522471); we are not regulated for general property purchases.