About four out of five leasehold flats listed for sale in England during 2025 had not found a buyer within six months. The figure comes from analysis Zoopla ran at the Guardian’s request for its report on 8 August 2026, covering flats listed during 2025, and it puts a number on something investors holding flats have been describing anecdotally for a year.
In short
- Four out of five leasehold flats listed in England did not sell within six months, on Zoopla’s analysis of 2025 listings.
- London was worst at about 87% unsold, against an England average of 80.5%.
- In London, investor-owned flats are typically priced around £450,000 against a first-time buyer budget of about £425,000, a gap of roughly £25,000.
- About a fifth of leasehold listings have less than 100 years left to run, and extending gets much dearer once a lease drops below 80 years.
- Underwrite the exit at six to nine months rather than three, and price the illiquidity as a discount.
In this guide: 5 sections
The instinct on reading it is to treat flats as a broken asset class. That is the wrong conclusion, and it is the expensive one, because it leads people either to dump flats at any price or to buy them purely because they look cheap. The useful reading is narrower. This is a liquidity problem before it is a value problem, and liquidity is something you can price.
Where leasehold flats sit unsold
Richard Donnell, Zoopla’s executive director, gave the regional split on the record:
| Region | Share unsold |
|---|---|
| London | About 87% |
| South east | 85% |
| East of England | 84% |
| England average | 80.5% |
One caveat belongs with those numbers, and it matters more than the decimal place.
Caveat: This was a one-off analysis commissioned by one newspaper rather than a published, repeatable index, and Zoopla has not set out its sample size or how it treated listings that were withdrawn and relisted. Treat the exact percentages as indicative rather than audit-ready.
What is independently checkable is the direction, and it holds: Zoopla’s own House Price Index published on 27 August 2026 has flats and maisonettes down 1.6% in the year to July while detached houses rose 1.1%, in a market where agreed sales in the four weeks to 16 August ran 6% below the same period last year.
The price gap that stalls the sale
The most useful part of Zoopla’s explanation is not about leasehold at all. It is about who is on each side of the transaction, and it is the part with a number attached.
Donnell’s account is that flats take longer to sell because the natural buyer and the natural seller want different prices. The natural buyer is a first-time buyer. The natural seller is often an investor with no particular urgency.
In London, where most first-time buyers are looking for flats rather than houses, he puts investor-owned flats on the market at around £450,000 against a typical first-time buyer budget of about £425,000.
Typical investor asking price, London
About £450,000
Typical first-time buyer budget, London
About £425,000
The stock is the right type and the wrong price, by roughly £25,000.
That is a more actionable diagnosis than a general complaint about leasehold, because a pricing gap closes when someone moves, and sellers without urgency move slowly. For a seller it is a pricing problem to solve rather than a market to write off.
What a leasehold buyer inherits
Leasehold is still doing real damage on top of the pricing gap, and it does it by giving a nervous buyer several separate reasons to withdraw:
- A service charge the buyer cannot control.
- A ground rent.
- A lease length their lender may object to.
- In some buildings, an unresolved cladding or remediation question.
Lease length is the one most often missed at the point of offer. About a fifth of leasehold listings have less than 100 years left to run, on Zoopla’s figures, and the cost of extending rises steeply as a lease shortens. Zoopla notes that the cost climbs quickly once a lease drops below 80 years.
Financing is tightening around the same properties from the other direction: a mortgage broker quoted in the same Guardian report said restrictive lending rules are shutting buyers out of the flats market, and that surveyors are increasingly down valuing flats.
A down valuation leaves the buyer’s mortgage short of the agreed price, so the sale is renegotiated or falls through.
The building-level version of this, where the lending fails outright, is covered in our piece on why a property becomes unmortgageable.
What it does to your exit
If you hold flats, the number that changes is not your valuation. It is your assumed sale period, which in many models is still three months.
Underwrite the exit at six to nine months instead and two things move. Your holding costs over the sale run higher, and your realistic exit price becomes the one that clears inside that window rather than the one an agent puts on the board in month one.
On a £200,000 flat with a £150,000 interest-only mortgage at an assumed 5%, six extra months of interest is £3,750. Add half a year of the typical leaseholder’s £1,900 service charge and £200 ground rent that Zoopla reports, and the delay costs about £4,800 before any price reduction, which on this evidence often arrives too.
Buying into an illiquid market
The other side of the same statistic is that four in five sellers are sitting in a queue, and a queue is where a buyer who can actually complete gets paid.
The discipline is to be clear about what you are being paid for. A discount on a flat is not compensation for a low yield, and it is not free money because the sector is unloved.
It is compensation for taking on the same illiquidity the seller is trying to escape, and you inherit it in full on the day you exchange. So price it explicitly.
Take the extra months you will need on exit, cost them, and require that as a discount on top of whatever the yield already justifies. A deal that only works if you sell faster than the person selling to you is relying on luck.
Two things genuinely change the maths and are worth paying for:
- A lease that can be extended at a known, quoted cost.
- A building with its remediation position settled in writing.
Both convert an open-ended risk into a priced one.
What this means for property investors
Treat this as a repricing of time rather than of value. Zoopla’s own index has flats down 1.6% over a year, which is a soft market and not a collapse. What has changed is how long it takes to turn one back into cash, and that belongs in the model rather than in the commentary.
If you hold, extend your assumed sale period and check lease length and remediation status before you need to sell rather than after. If you are buying, insist on being paid for the illiquidity, get the lease extension quoted rather than estimated, and allow for the survey coming in under the asking price. The wider market backdrop sits in our note on where UK house prices are running.
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