Saw the Nationwide data this morning showing the first monthly drop of 2026 and Savills now forecasting minus 2% for the year, which is quite a shift from the start of the year when everyone was talking about modest growth. So I went on Rightmove this morning and had a proper look at the villages around me in east Leicestershire, places like Tilton, Hallaton, that kind of thing, and honestly I cannot see any evidence of falling prices at all. If anything the three beds that were coming on at £260k to £280k six months ago are now being listed at £275k to £295k. There are more properties available than there were in January (I counted 14 on one postcode that usually has about 8 or 9) BUT the asking prices have not come down to reflect the extra supply.
Now I realise asking prices and sold prices are different things, and I know the Nationwide figures are based on mortgage completions which lag the market by months, but I am curious whether anyone else is actually seeing genuine price reductions in their area or whether this is still mainly a London and South East story. Savills said the least affordable markets would fall the most which makes sense, but does that mean places like rural Leicestershire just carry on as they were? My son is trying to buy his first place around here and I keep telling him to wait but I am starting to wonder if that advice is wrong for this area.
Anyone seeing real movement where they are?
Asking prices are the last thing to move. Always. Look at days on market and how many listings have had a price reduction in the last 30 days. That is where you see it first. If you are seeing 14 properties where there used to be 8, that IS the price fall, it just has not shown up in the numbers yet because vendors are still listing at fantasy prices.
As for your son, telling a first time buyer to wait is risky advice in any market. Rates are still above 5%, stamp duty thresholds have come down, and if he waits six months and prices drop 3% but rates go back up he is no better off. The monthly payment is the thing that matters, not the purchase price in isolation.
Similar story here in West Yorkshire. There are three houses for sale on my estate right now which is unusual, normally there is one at most. Two of them have been listed since March and neither has had a board change. The asking prices look about the same as what things were going for last autumn so I would not say they have gone up, but they have not come down either. One of the owners told me he has had a few viewings but no offers which is not great for three months on the market.
I think the issue around here is that a lot of the stock is ex council and the buyers at that level are very rate sensitive. With fixes still above 5% the monthly payments are just too high for people on average wages. Whether that turns into actual price falls or just things sitting unsold for longer I am not sure.
Down here in the New Forest area there is a definite two speed market at the moment. Anything under about £350k, so your two bed cottages and starter homes, is still moving reasonably well because those buyers have no choice, they need somewhere to live and they just swallow the rate. Above that and into the £500k plus bracket it has gone noticeably quieter since Easter. I know of two detached houses on the lane behind us that were both reduced in the last fortnight, one by £25k and the other by what I think was about £15k. Neither had any offers at the original price.
I would not assume rural areas are immune, @Dhman1971. It depends on who your buyers are and where their money comes from. If a significant chunk of demand in east Leicestershire comes from people selling in Leicester city and trading up, and those city sellers are finding it harder, then it feeds through eventually. The lag is real but it is not permanent.
PS The extra stock you are seeing is probably the more interesting signal than the asking prices. Sellers always list high and hope. The corrections come later.
The Nationwide index only captures properties bought with a Nationwide mortgage, which is a fraction of total transactions. It tells you something but not as much as people think. The more interesting figure is the Savills revision to minus 2% for the year, because Savills base their forecasts on actual transaction data and conversations with agents across price brackets. When they revise that sharply it usually means conditions on the ground are worse than the headline numbers suggest, not better. The fact that mortgage approvals are rising does not contradict this either, people are still buying but they are buying at lower prices than six months ago in many areas. The approval count going up while average values go down is perfectly consistent with a market that is correcting. From what I am seeing in the Midlands, three bed semis that were £220k last autumn are now sitting at £210k to £215k and still not shifting quickly. That is a real terms fall even before you account for inflation.
Just noticed this morning that one of the three houses I mentioned on my estate has had its asking price dropped by £10k. It was listed at £185k and is now showing £175k on Rightmove. It has been on since late March so that is nearly three months with no buyer. The other two are still at their original asking prices but neither has a sold subject to contract board up.
I had a quick look at the wider area on Rightmove and filtered by price reductions in the last 30 days, as @CyclingChap47 suggested. There were quite a few, mostly in the £150k to £250k range which is the bread and butter round here. Whether that is normal for June or something more meaningful I honestly do not know.
@Greyrooftile74 that is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping people would report back on, because the headline indices only tell you what happened two or three months ago and the price reductions happening NOW are where the story actually is. My son is looking for a two bed in the East Midlands and I have been tracking about fifteen properties on Rightmove for him since April, five of those have now had at least one price reduction, two of them have had two. The ones that are selling quickly are the ones priced sensibly from the start, which sounds obvious BUT tells you that the demand is still there, it is just refusing to pay 2024 prices. The question is whether vendors who listed in March at optimistic numbers are going to chase the market down or just sit it out and hope for the autumn. My guess is the ones who need to sell will adjust and the rest will withdraw, which means the headline stock numbers could actually fall even as the market softens. Confusing times.
Interesting theory @Dhman1971 but down here I am seeing something slightly different. The withdrawals are happening, yes, but most of those properties are coming back on three or four weeks later with a different agent at a lower price. So the stock level stays high but the listing history gets muddied because Rightmove treats it as a new listing. If you are not tracking individual properties manually you would not spot it.
The net effect is that buyers who are paying attention (and most serious ones are) see the same house appearing as “new” at £15k less than it was a month ago, which does not exactly inspire confidence in the market. I suspect this recycling of listings is one of the reasons sentiment feels worse than the actual transaction data suggests. The market is not crashing, it is just very slow and a bit confused about where fair value actually sits 
@Greyrooftile74 that is exactly the pattern I keep seeing, listed too high, sits for two months, drops by £10k or more and then STILL sits. My son has been watching a two bed end terrace in Melton Mowbray that went on at £195k in April, reduced to £185k last week, and I can see on Rightmove it has had the listing refreshed twice already which usually means the agent is trying to bump it back up the search results. The thing that tells me this is NOT just seasonal softening is that these reductions are happening on bread and butter family homes, not the overpriced aspirational stuff that always has to come down. When your bog standard three bed semi on a 1970s estate is having to drop £10k to get a viewing, that is the market repricing, not a vendor being a bit optimistic. The sales activity data from last week (down nearly 9% year on year) tells the same story from the other direction.
Is it repricing though or is it just vendors finally catching up with where the market already was. There is a difference. A lot of what went on the market in March and April was priced on the back of those optimistic forecasts from Savills and Knight Frank at the start of the year. Now those forecasts have been pulled back and agents are having the awkward conversation. That is not a falling market, that is an overpriced market correcting to its actual level. Actual agreed sale prices in most areas have barely moved. The RICS demand figure is still negative but it has stopped getting worse. Sales volumes are up on a rolling basis even if one week in June dipped. I am not saying everything is fine but the narrative that the bottom is falling out based on a few Rightmove reductions and one Nationwide print feels premature.
@CyclingChap47 I take the point about overpriced listings correcting, and that is certainly part of it. But the days on market data locally is telling a slightly different story. I have been tracking a handful of properties on the Lymington/Brockenhurst corridor since March, just out of curiosity, and the average time from listing to under offer has gone from about 28 days in March to well over 50 days now for equivalent properties. That is not just a pricing correction, that is fewer active buyers for the same stock.
The other thing I would flag is that viewings are converting at a noticeably lower rate. An agent friend down here (yes, I do know one reasonable one ) told me last week that they are doing more viewings per sale than at any point since early 2023. People are looking but not committing. Whether that is rates, the Middle East, or just general mood is hard to say.
PS: The weekly sales figure is noisy, agreed, but the direction of travel feels real to me.
Spent an hour this morning going through Rightmove with my son and the picture locally (east Midlands, market town area) is pretty stark. Since last Sunday there have been four more price reductions on properties we have been tracking, all in the £150k to £220k range which is exactly where he is looking. One three bed semi that went on at £210k in April is now down to £189k and STILL showing as available, no under offer flag, nothing. That is a £21k drop in about ten weeks and the place looks perfectly fine from the photos.
Saw the data earlier in the week about sales agreed being down nearly 9% compared to this time last year. If you combine that with the price drops we are seeing locally it starts to feel like the market is not just correcting from overpriced listings (which is what @CyclingChap47 was arguing), it is actually softening. There is a difference between vendors coming down from fantasy land and genuine demand dropping away, and I think we are now getting into the second category.
The question my son keeps asking me is whether to wait. And honestly I do not know. If Savills are right about minus 2% for the year then waiting six months could save him £4k on a £200k property, BUT that assumes rates do not climb further which would wipe out any price saving through higher monthly payments. The MPC decision on Wednesday is not going to change anything by itself but the commentary around it might shift sentiment one way or the other.
Anyone else doing the Sunday Rightmove scroll and seeing similar??
@Dhman1971 be careful with the 8.9% year on year comparison. June 2025 was the tail end of the stamp duty deadline rush. Sales were artificially high last summer. Comparing against that and concluding demand has dropped away is misleading.
The price drops you are seeing, a three bed semi coming down from £210k to £189k. That property was overpriced from day one. It was not worth £210k in April and it probably is not worth £189k now either. That is not the market softening, that is a vendor who was given bad advice by an agent chasing the instruction.
Your son should be watching what actually sells and at what price relative to asking. Not what sits and drops. Two different things.
@CyclingChap47 fair point about the stamp duty comparator, I had not factored that in properly. If you strip out the deadline rush effect the year on year drop is probably more like 3 to 4% rather than 9%, which still is not nothing but is less dramatic than the headline suggests.
That said, down here at the higher end I am now fairly confident it is more than just overpriced listings correcting. A four bed detached on the edge of Brockenhurst was withdrawn last week after sitting at £725k for about ten weeks with no viewings at all according to the agent I spoke to. That property was reasonably priced for the area, the owners had done proper research on comparables, and it still could not generate a single viewing. That is not a pricing problem, that is a demand problem.
Below £350k it remains a different story. Two properties on my road went under offer in the last fortnight, both within a week of listing.
Quick update on the two bed end terrace my son has been watching. It was listed at £165k in April, dropped to £155k at the end of May, and as of yesterday has dropped again to £145k. That is 12% off the original asking in under two months and it is STILL sitting there with no offers according to the agent. For context the last comparable sale on that street was £148k in November so they are now below that.
I mention this because the Rightmove data out this week shows asking prices down 0.6% nationally in June, biggest June drop in fourteen years. Nationally that sounds modest but when you look at individual properties like this one the reality on the ground is much more dramatic. The averages smooth everything out. What is actually happening street by street is vendors chasing the market down and still not finding buyers. My son is tempted but I have told him to wait, if they have already dropped twice they will drop again.
Just seen the Rightmove June data and it confirms what we have been watching play out in real time on this thread. Asking prices down 0.6% month on month, biggest June fall in fourteen years, and now 0.5% below where they were a year ago. Savills have cut their full year forecast to minus 2% which if anything feels conservative given the trajectory.
I said weeks ago on here that the stamp duty deadline comparison was distorting the year on year figures and making things look better than they actually were, and now we are past that distortion the real picture is starting to show. The fundamentals have NOT changed, rates are still elevated (confirmed again today with the hold), affordability is stretched, and the listings that went on too high in the spring are now chasing the market down.
My son rang me this morning about that two bed end terrace I mentioned, the one that started at £165k and is now at £145k. His mortgage broker ran the numbers yesterday and at current rates on a 5% deposit the monthly payment would still be around £950 a month on a 30 year term, which on £38k gross is tight to say the least. And this is a property that has ALREADY dropped £20k. The question he keeps asking me is should he wait for another drop, and honestly I am running out of reasons to say no. If Savills are right about minus 2% for the year and the real correction is concentrated in the less affordable markets (which is where we are, relatively speaking) then holding off three to six months could save him another £5k to £10k.
Anyone else finding themselves advising their kids to sit tight right now?
No. The opposite. My nephew bought in Coventry last October and everyone told him to wait because prices were going to fall further. He found a place he liked at a price he could afford and he went for it. Six months later the identical type next door sold for £3k more because a landlord wanted it for a portfolio.
Timing the market on individual residential purchases is a mug’s game. The Rightmove and Savills numbers describe averages across hundreds of thousands of transactions, they tell you almost nothing about what a specific two bed end terrace in a specific postcode will do over the next three months. If your son can afford the payments at current rates and the property is right, the risk of waiting is that someone else buys it. A £5k theoretical saving is worthless if the property goes and the next one is worse.