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A higher proportion of homes in London were sold at a loss than any other region in England and Wales last year, according to a study, in the latest sign of weakness in the capital’s property market.
Hamptons’ analysis of Land Registry data shows that 14.8 per cent of London sellers sold for less in 2025 than they originally paid, above the national average of 8.7 per cent.
This was the same share as in 2024, but higher than any other region in England and Wales — the first year in a decade that the North East of the country did not top the ranking.
The high proportion in London was driven by flats, with 22 per cent of them selling at a loss compared with 3.5 per cent of houses, making it “increasingly difficult for flat owners to bridge the step up to a house”, according to the report.
Sales at a loss were also more common in the most expensive boroughs of the capital, with the proportion in the City of London, Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster, and Hammersmith and Fulham all above 20 per cent. Instead, in Barking and Dagenham, where housing is cheaper, just 5.3 per cent of sellers sold below the purchase price, according to the research.
Aneisha Beveridge, head of research at Hamptons, said: “In London, upward house price growth is no longer the one-way bet it once seemed.”
“In some cases, even owners who bought a decade ago still face getting back less than they paid, something that would have been almost unthinkable in the heady days of 2015,” she added.
The share of sales that were lossmaking in London is up from 9.2 per cent in 2019 and 5.9 per cent a decade ago.
In contrast, the share of lossmaking sales in the North East has more than halved since 2019, falling to 13.9 per cent in 2025.
“Nationally, rising gains in the north have helped offset shrinking returns in the south,” said Beveridge. “And with much of the recent price growth in the north and Midlands now baked in, it’s possible that seller gains there could outpace those in the south — in both cash and percentage terms — for the foreseeable future.”
FT analysis of official data published last month revealed that house prices are falling in around half of London’s boroughs, with flats underperforming the rest of the market.
Beveridge said that over the next few years, more sellers are likely to have missed out on London’s 2012-16 house price boom, having bought instead at what turned out to be the top of the market.
It comes as separate research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies showed that the property price boom in the 1990s and 2000s reduced social mobility.
The analysis said that “enormous” wealth gains linked to the surge in house prices over that period led to children of homeowners in booming areas having relatively more housing wealth themselves in their late 20s to late 30s. They were also more likely to own homes in London and the wider south east than other children.
Peter Levell, a deputy research director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said: “The surge in house prices from the mid-1990s until the mid-2000s created significant and lasting inequalities — not just between people at the time, but among their children as well.”