England's Slowest and Fastest Home Sale Markets

Latest data shows house sale transactions are taking an average of 109.02 days to complete across England & Wales over the last year.

Some of the quickest areas to sell a property at the moment include Bath, Frome and Warminster.

Professional house buying firm Property Solvers’ speed of sale tool has revealed that it’s taking an average of 15.57 weeks to sell a property across England.

Updated monthly, the latest dataset analysed 23,499 property sales across the region between April 2020 and April 2021.

The statistics track the moment a property is listed on the UK’s largest property portal Rightmove to the point it’s marked as officially ‘sold’ at the HM Land Registry.

As shown in the table below, properties were selling the fastest in Bath (BA1), Frome (BA11) and Warminster (BA12) adopting a minimum number of 35 property sales in a given area. In the top 10 areas, Property Solvers revealed that homes took 113.60 days (16.23 weeks) to sell on average.

England’s Fastest Areas to Sell a Property (April 2020 to April 2021)
Area	Postcode	Average No. of Days to Sell	No. of Properties
Bath	BA1	107	50
Frome	BA11	124	65
Warminster	BA12	95	53
Trowbridge	BA14	119	98
Street	BA16	111	40
Bath	BA2	113	95
Yeovil	BA21	117	66
Radstock	BA3	121	54
Wells	BA5	120	35
Birmingham	B13	109	35

Homes were selling the slowest in the Towcester (NN12), Peacehaven (BN10) and Macclesfield (SK11) postcodes (also sampling a minimum data set of 35 property sales). In the bottom 10 postcodes, the data showed that properties were taking 131.80 days (18.83 weeks) to sell on average.

England & Wales’s Slowest Areas to Sell a Property (April 2020 to April 2021)
Area	Postcode	Average No. of Days to Sell	No. of Properties
Towcester	NN12	139	40
Peacehaven	BN10	134	36
Macclesfield	SK11	134	44
Harwich	CO12	133	38
Andover	SP10	131	61
Ely	CB6	130	88
Nottingham	NG2	130	66
Birmingham	B30	129	52
Poole	BH16	129	40
Reading	RG5	129	58

Property Solvers co-founder, Ruban Selvanayagam commented: “Despite the broad level of inactivity under the first COVID-19 lockdown, the estate agency industry has recovered relatively quickly.”

“Whilst buyer demand certainly hasn’t waned as many predicted, the time for house transactions to complete has certainly lengthened.”

“Many solicitors, mortgage brokers and other professionals in our sector have been working from home which has often resulted in further administrative and other operational delays. However, with restrictions gradually being lifted, and more people returning to office, the property buying and selling process should hopefully accelerate,” he continued.

Nonetheless, Selvanayagam concluded, many of the processes remain slow and archaic – “an issue that’s likely to continue post-pandemic.”