The Great British housing freeze
Britain hasn't just seen prices rise — it has stopped moving house. Fewer sales, longer ownerships, and a flipping market reduced to a sliver, visible town by town in the full sales record.
Completed sales in England & Wales are running about 40% below the early-2000s norm; homes resold in 2026 had been owned a median of 9.1 years, the longest on the modern record; and resales within two years of purchase — one in five resales before 2008 — are down to 3.4%. The freeze is national, but it is not even.
Four-year windows, standard market sales, towns with 15,000+ sales in the early window. Every large market has shrunk — this is the league of how hard.
Methodology & use
Volumes count standard market sales in the HM Land Registry Price Paid record for England & Wales (a different scope from HMRC’s UK-wide, £40k+ transaction counts — our basis is consistent across the whole period). Holding periods come from repeat sales: the same property matched across consecutive sales, so a “median of 8.9 years” means half of the homes actually resold that year had been bought less than 8.9 years earlier and half longer. Because our record begins in 2000, holding medians are only quoted for recent years, where the observation window is deep enough not to bias them. Free to quote with attribution to Housometer and a link; town cuts and comment same-day via contact.
Source: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data (© Crown copyright), OGL v3.0. Analysis: Housometer, July 2026. See also how we work with data.
This analysis comes from the data behind every report.
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