Over a third of people selling their homes in England and Wales could have their asking price slashed at least once before any sale is finalised. That’s according to new data released by We Buy Any Home who commissioned a study which looked at the value of just under a million property sales between 2023 and 2025. The main finding of the study was just over a third of houses which were sold in 2025 had undergone at least one reduction compared to just over 8% in 2023.
We Buy Any Home stated that properties that needed reductions made eventually sold for an average of £34, 000 less than the asking price. It can be argued that setting an asking price which is unrealistically high can prove costly in today’s market.
It was also discovered that properties which had repeated reductions usually took longer to sell. It said that every individual price cut was linked to £12, 000 being knocked off the eventual selling price. Properties which were reduced three or more times usually took ten weeks longer to sell which can be a headache for people who are in urgent need of cash during an uncertain financial climate.
Wales recorded the largest difference between initial asking and eventual selling prices in 2025, at an average of 5.2%, followed by London at 5%. The East Midlands, East of England and South West completed the five areas with the largest gaps.
The North East performed better than any other region in the study. Around 28% of properties there had their price reduced, while the average difference between the original asking price and selling price was 2.9%.
At local level, Colyton in Devon had the largest difference identified by the research, with homes eventually selling for an average of 16.02% less than their initial asking price.
We Buy Any Home chief executive Elliot Castle argues some estate agents are giving sellers overly optimistic valuations to win their business, leaving homeowners to discover the true market value after the property has already been listed.
Tytl, the property-data company which supplied the information used in the study, argues properties can become less attractive to buyers if they remain listed for a long time and undergo repeated price reductions.
Other property market data supports the broader finding that asking price reductions became common during 2025. Rightmove reported in November that 34% of homes then for sale had already had their asking price reduced, the highest proportion it had recorded since February 2024.
Zoopla separately found that homes requiring an asking price reduction during 2025 took 2.4 times longer to sell than properties which did not need a reduction. This supports the report’s argument that getting the initial price wrong can substantially delay a sale.
The report’s finding that the North East was relatively resilient is also consistent with wider market data. Official figures showed the North East had the strongest annual house price growth of any English region at the end of 2025, with prices up 4.6% year on year.
The market remains price sensitive in 2026. Zoopla’s latest figures show UK house-price growth at around 1.4%, and it expects growth to slow towards 1% by the end of this year. It expects prices to remain stronger in northern England than in London and the South East.
The study’s own methodology says its coverage of properties which first came onto the market before mid-2023 was more limited. That means the headline rise from 8.1% of properties requiring reductions in 2023 to 36.2% in 2025 is not necessarily a like-for-like comparison.
There is also a distinction between ‘losing £33,597’ and selling for £33,597 below an original asking price. An asking price is not money the homeowner ever possessed or was guaranteed to receive. The study shows an average difference between the starting price and eventual sale price; it cannot demonstrate that sellers would have received the higher amount had the property been priced differently.
