UK’s best and worst performing property markets over the last five years revealed

Property purchasing specialist, HBB Solutions, has revealed which areas of the UK property market have been the worst place to sell a home, based on the most muted market performance seen over the last five years.

HBB Solutions analysed the average annual number of homes sold across each area of the UK over the last five years, to reveal which areas of the property market have consistently ranked as the best and worst to sell a home.

The figures show that over the last five years, an average of 986,839 homes have been sold across the UK each and every year.

The South East has been the best performing region with an annual average of 143,886 homes sold each year, followed by the North West (110,437) and Scotland (101,885).

At local authority level, Birmingham has been the UK’s homesellers hotspot, with an average of 12,179 properties sold on an annual basis.

Leeds has also performed well with 11,726 homes sold on average each year, with Glasgow (11,579), Edinburgh (11,369) and Cornwall (10,093) also ranking within the top five.

However, when it comes to the worst place to be a homeseller, the City of London, Rutland and Merthyr Tydfil top the table.

An average of just 201 homes per year have been sold across the City of London over the last five years, with Rutland seeing just 650, climbing to just 739 per year in Merthyr Tydfil.

Richmondshire (746) and Oadby and Wigston (774) also rank within the top five areas for the lowest sales volumes.

Managing Director of House Buyer Bureau, Chris Hodgkinson, commented:

“The pandemic property market boom has pushed house prices and transaction levels to record highs over the last two years, but a period of unprecedented boom doesn’t necessarily reveal where the best performing pockets of the housing market are.

When also taking into account a prolonged period where the market underperformed due to political uncertainty caused by Brexit, we can see which towns and cities have put in the strongest and most consistent performance over a longer period of time.

That isn’t to say that those areas to have seen the lowest level of sales volumes aren’t desirable, but it highlights the diversity of the market and how one area won’t necessarily enjoy the same boom period as another.

This is an incredibly important consideration when looking to sell your home as these granular levels of market activity and the prices achieved locally are the factors that will impact your chances of selling, not the benchmark set by the UK average.”