How Long Does it Take to Sell a House in 2019

The question of how fast you can sell your house in 2019 has been addressed by Rightmove who have reported that 28% of the homes advertised for sale on their property portal have remained unsold for over 6 months. Furthermore, 8% of homes listed have remained advertised for over a year.

For those who don’t know, Rightmove is the largest property portal for advertising homes for sale in the UK. It’s used by almost every estate agent and is usually the first place any house buyer looks when looking to buy a home. Along with the monthly House Price Index, Rightmove often publish internal information that they can see which shows a true reflection of the current sentiment in the market. In fact, the data that Rightmove publish is so important for the industry that Surveyors use the portal to establish the market value of your home and have access to Rightmove Plus which can be seen discussed in our article here.

This new data published by Rightmove which shows an increase in the amount of time it takes to sell a home isn’t necessarily as alarming as one would think at first site. Last year the figure was only slightly less, showing that 27% of homes failed to sell in the first 6 months and of course towards the end of the last recession the property market was really in the doldrums for a variety of different reasons but largely due to the lack of mortgages available and at that time there were more than 40% of properties remaining unsold for over 6 months and 29% of sellers couldn’t find a buyer for over a year. Further to this issue at Direct House Buyer we have produced an interesting analysis of when the next recession will be.

The Threat of a Recession is Stopping Properties form Being Sold

For many sellers who need to sell their house fast the current uncertainty in the market is largely due to Brexit uncertainty and that’s preventing Buyers from having enough faith that moving home in the current climate is a good idea. Lets face facts who would want to raise the funds for a deposit only to have that wiped out by a dramatic fall in house prices. Not only would it be wiser to wait for a fall and buy at the bottom of the market many homeowners in the last recession where further forced to top up their deposit requirement once they already owned their home because there mortgage contract allowed the lender to repossess their property if it fell into negative equity. More information about whether or not now is the right time to buy a house can be seen here.

House Prices Have gone up 5% in the Last Few Months

Conflicting data is showing that the property market may be more buoyant then some currently think. Aprils House Price Index showed a 1.1% price jump in April and it’s also reported that house prices are 5% higher than last year. This news does shows a reversal in trend however it needs to be acknowledged that this is a comparison with an already subdued market that we have seen over the past 3 years, which has been stated by Russell Galley who is the Managing Director at Halifax. It is also believed that low mortgage rates are currently supporting the housing market so one would think that if mortgage rates and lending criteria increases then the property market could become even more stagnant. At Direct House Buyer we believe that if the lenders start to pull mortgage products or increase Interest Rates then this could start a very negative chain of events.