There are few beliefs more deeply ingrained in the British psyche than the idea that you cannot lose money on property. Shares go up and down, businesses fail and investments disappear, but bricks and mortar are different. Buy a house, live in it for a few years, watch the valuation double every eight minutes, and, when the time comes to move, you can reasonably expect to sell it for an amount equal to the GDP of Rwanda.
Even if house prices fall (which they won’t, I promise), the conventional wisdom is that you simply wait for them to recover. Property is a safe investment because, over the long term, house prices always go up. Or so we are repeatedly told.
I was therefore surprised to see somebody on X recently referring to research suggesting that a substantial proportion of properties sold in Britain during 2026 had actually been sold at a loss.
The research, published by property valuation company ValuQ (https://valuq.co.uk/insights/recently-bought-homes-resold-at-a-loss-highest-since-2013-2026), found that 16.3% of properties in England and Wales resold within five years of purchase during the first six months of 2026 had sold for less than their owners originally paid. That amounted to 7,093 loss-making transactions out of 43,408 sales, with the proportion of sellers losing money reaching its highest level since 2013.
I thought that was a remarkable statistic, particularly given that it covered people who had purchased their properties relatively recently, rather than those who had bought before a major housing market crash.
But there was something else about the research that interested me. ValuQ had defined a loss simply as a property being sold for less than its original purchase price, without accounting for transaction costs (stamp duty, estate agents’ fees, surveyors’ fees and legal costs) or inflation.
That seemed to leave a rather important question unanswered.
How many people who sold their properties in 2026 actually made money?
I found the 16.3% statistic so striking I decided to examine the underlying transactions myself.
How Many Properties Were Sold at a Loss in 2026?
I downloaded HM Land Registry’s records of property transactions between 2021 and 2026 and matched properties sold during the first half of 2026 with their previous purchase transactions.
Following the broad methodology used by ValuQ, I restricted the analysis to ordinary residential property sales in England and Wales where the property had previously been purchased at least one year, but less than five years, before being sold.
This produced a sample of 44,680 property sales completed between 1 January and 30 June 2026.
The sample is slightly larger than ValuQ’s original 43,408 transactions because the Land Registry files I used contained additional registrations, but the results were remarkably similar.
Full disclosure, I used AI to go through and match the transactions, as I do not know how I would have done it manually without locking myself in a windowless room for the next five years. I did not get out a pen and paper and physically match each of the more than 44,000 transactions myself so I cannot guarantee that all matched transactions are 100% correct. But, I ran the calculations for the same statistic that ValuQ’s original analysis came up with and matched their findings, so I am as confident as I can be that the AI model has done the job properly.
My model found that of those 44,680 matched properties, 7,307 were sold for less than their original purchase price, representing 16.4% of the total.
In other words, approximately one in six people selling a property that they had bought within the previous five years received less for it than they originally paid.
However, the remaining 83.6% of sales were not necessarily profitable. They were simply transactions in which the selling price was at least as high as the original purchase price.
If somebody bought a house for £300,000 and sold it three years later for £310,000, the Land Registry figures would record a £10,000 capital gain – but would that person actually have made any money?
What Happens When We Include the Costs of Buying and Selling?
Buying a property in Britain is an expensive exercise, even before anyone starts paying a mortgage or buys a single item of furniture.
There is stamp duty (or Land Transaction Tax in Wales), solicitors’ fees, surveys and various other expenses associated with the purchase. When the owner eventually decides to sell, there are further legal fees and, in most cases, an estate agent who expects to be paid a percentage of the selling price.
MoneyHelper (https://www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/homes/buying-a-home/selling-your-house-or-flat-england-wales-northern-ireland) reports that the average estate agency fee in 2026 is 1.42%, including VAT. On a £350,000 property, that alone amounts to £4,970.
To investigate the effect of these costs, I returned to the 44,680 transactions and recalculated the profitability of each sale using the following assumptions: £2,000 of legal and other purchasing expenses, the standard stamp duty or Welsh Land Transaction Tax applicable at the time of purchase, an estate agency fee of 1.42% of the eventual selling price, and £1,500 of selling expenses.
These are necessarily estimates. The Land Registry records do not tell us whether someone was a first-time buyer or negotiated a discounted fee with their estate agent. I have therefore used a consistent set of assumptions rather than pretending that I know precisely how much every homeowner spent.
Once the estimated costs of buying and selling were included, the number of loss-making transactions increased from 7,307 to 14,394, equivalent to 32.2% of all 44,680 sales.
Almost one in three properties had therefore failed to generate enough of a capital gain to cover their purchase and sale costs – and this was before considering inflation.
What Happens When We Account for Inflation?
There is a fundamental difference between selling something for more pounds than you originally paid and becoming wealthier as a result.
Suppose you bought a property for £300,000 in June 2022 and sold it four years later for £350,000. You might reasonably tell your friends that you had made £50,000 on your house.
But between June 2022 and June 2026, consumer prices increased by approximately 17%, according to the Office for National Statistics (https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/timeseries/d7bt/mm23).
That means the £300,000 you spent purchasing the property in 2022 was worth approximately £351,000 in June 2026 money.
Your apparently impressive £50,000 capital gain had therefore been entirely eliminated by inflation, even before including the expenses associated with buying and selling.
This is particularly important when looking at properties purchased between 2021 and 2023, because those buyers experienced the extraordinary period of inflation that followed the pandemic.
I therefore carried out a third calculation on the original 44,680 property sales, this time adjusting the original purchase price and estimated buying costs for inflation between the month of purchase and the month of sale, while also deducting the estimated costs of selling.
The result was considerably more dramatic than I had expected.
Of the 44,680 properties sold during the first half of 2026, 34,172 – or 76.5% – failed to generate a positive inflation-adjusted capital return after estimated transaction costs.
None of those numbers are a typo. More than three-quarters of sellers in 2026 who had bought their property in the previous five years lost money in real terms.
To put that into perspective, the results of my three calculations were as follows:
| Definition of a loss | Properties | Percentage |
| Sold for less than the purchase price | 7,307 | 16.4% |
| Loss after estimated transaction costs | 14,394 | 32.2% |
| Real loss after transaction costs and inflation | 34,172 | 76.5% |
*Source: My analysis of 44,680 matched HM Land Registry transactions in England and Wales, January–June 2026. The adjusted figures use estimated costs and ONS CPI inflation.
Of course, the precise percentage depends to some extent on the transaction costs assumed. A first-time buyer might have paid less stamp duty, while somebody using a particularly expensive estate agent might have spent more than my estimates.
However, I also ran the analysis without including any transaction costs whatsoever. Even under that assumption, 67.6% of the properties had failed to appreciate sufficiently to keep pace with inflation.
In other words, the principal finding does not depend on whether an estate agent charged 1% or 2%, or whether someone qualified for a stamp duty exemption. The overwhelming majority of these properties simply had not increased in value quickly enough to preserve their purchasing power over the period in which they were owned.
That is a rather different picture from the one suggested by the headline figures showing that only one in six properties sold for less than their purchase price.
How Much Would Your Property Need to Increase in Value to Break Even?
To illustrate just how important inflation has been, imagine somebody purchasing a property in England for £300,000 and selling it in June 2026. How much would they need to receive to recover their original expenditure, including estimated buying and selling costs, while preserving the purchasing power of their money?
The answer depends enormously on when they bought – and shocked me when I ran the numbers.
| Purchase date | Original price | Break-even sale price in June 2026 | Required increase |
| June 2021 | £300,000 | £393,749 | 31.2% |
| June 2022 | £300,000 | £365,870 | 22.0% |
| June 2023 | £300,000 | £336,246 | 12.1% |
| June 2024 | £300,000 | £329,756 | 9.9% |
*Calculations use ONS CPI inflation, historical standard stamp duty rates, £2,000 of buying fees, £1,500 of selling fees and a 1.42% estate agency commission. The June 2021 example benefits from the stamp duty holiday then in force. These figures exclude financing and ongoing ownership costs.
Consider the first example – somebody who purchased a house for £300,000 in June 2021 and sold it for £390,000 five years later would probably consider themselves to have done rather well. After all, they had sold the house for £90,000 more than they paid, representing an increase of 30% in just five years.
Yet, under the assumptions used in my calculations, they would still have fallen short of recovering the inflation-adjusted value of their original expenditure and transaction costs.
Between June 2021 and June 2026, consumer prices increased by approximately 31.2%. Almost all of that apparent 30% gain had therefore disappeared before the costs of buying and selling were considered.
The figures for later buyers are less dramatic, simply because they experienced fewer years of inflation. Nevertheless, a buyer who paid £300,000 in June 2022 would still have needed to sell for nearly £366,000 just four years later to break even in real terms after the estimated costs.
We tend to think of a property increasing in value by £50,000 or £100,000 as generating wealth. As I argued in my recent article about Britain’s obsession with rising house prices, there is a fundamental difference between property becoming more expensive and society becoming wealthier. But there is also a more immediate question for the individual homeowner: how much are those additional pounds actually worth?
Are Some Types of Property More Likely to Lose Money?
The results become even more interesting when broken down by property type.
Flats have been particularly badly affected by the recent weakness in the housing market, but I was surprised by how poorly some of the other categories performed after inflation – I admit my assumption before looking at the data was that flats would perform worse compared to houses than they actually have done.
| Property type | Nominal loss | After Costs | After Costs & Inflation |
| Detached houses | 17.5% | 35.0% | 78.8% |
| Semi-detached houses | 11.9% | 25.7% | 71.9% |
| Terraced houses | 11.8% | 26.0% | 72.9% |
| Flats | 29.5% | 49.5% | 87.0% |
*Source: My analysis of HM Land Registry transactions, January–June 2026.
Of the 8,453 flats in my sample, 29.5% had sold for less than their original purchase price. Once the estimated costs of buying and selling were included, that figure increased to 49.5%.
Almost half of these flat owners had therefore made a nominal loss after transaction costs, without inflation entering the equation.
After inflation, the proportion increased to 87%.
There are several possible explanations for the relative weakness of flats, including increasingly expensive service charges, concerns about building safety, leasehold complications and the premium that buyers sometimes pay for new-build developments. Flats also appear to have benefited less than houses from the changes in housing preferences that followed the pandemic. My figures cannot establish the relative importance of these factors, but they do demonstrate that flats have performed particularly poorly in this sample.
What interested me almost as much, however, was the finding for detached houses.
Only 17.5% had sold for a nominal loss, which might initially suggest that the overwhelming majority had been relatively successful investments. But after transaction costs and inflation were accounted for, 78.8% had failed to deliver a positive real capital return.
Even detached houses, which I would have expected to be among the safer investments, have performed surprisingly poorly.
Does It Matter When You Bought?
Unsurprisingly, the year in which somebody purchased their property makes an enormous difference.
Buying at the height of the market in 2022 has produced a rather different experience from buying at the beginning of 2024, particularly once the inflation experienced over each ownership period is taken into account.
Here are the figures for each purchasing year:
| Purchase year | Properties resold | Nominal loss | After Costs | After Costs & Inflation |
| 2021 | 14,392 | 9.9% | 18.5% | 84.3% |
| 2022 | 13,859 | 21.6% | 41.0% | 84.2% |
| 2023 | 9,060 | 19.9% | 38.4% | 68.4% |
| 2024 | 6,377 | 15.1% | 35.0% | 57.8% |
| 2025 | 992 | 13.1% | 34.1% | 48.8% |
*Source: My analysis of HM Land Registry transactions resold during January–June 2026. The 2025 sample is relatively small and includes only properties held for at least one year.
The 2022 figures are particularly revealing. More than one in five properties purchased that year and subsequently sold during the first half of 2026 changed hands for less than their original purchase price. Once estimated transaction costs were considered, that increased to 41%.
But the finding that really stands out is the comparison between 2021 and 2022.
Only 9.9% of properties purchased in 2021 and subsequently resold during the period made a nominal loss, compared with 21.6% of those bought in 2022.
Yet once inflation and transaction costs were taken into account, the results were almost identical: 84.3% of the 2021 properties and 84.2% of the 2022 properties failed to produce a positive real capital return.
The explanation is that buyers in 2021 generally benefited from more nominal house price appreciation, but also experienced a longer period during which inflation was eroding the purchasing power of their original investment.
The results improve for properties purchased in 2023 and 2024, although even among the latter group a majority of the completed resales failed the inflation-adjusted test.
It is also worth remembering that these figures do not tell us how all the people who purchased properties in those years have performed. They tell us about the subset who subsequently sold during the first six months of 2026.
Which raises another question.
What About the People Who Decided Not to Sell?
There is a significant limitation to any analysis based exclusively on completed property transactions: it tells us nothing about the people who would like to sell their properties but cannot achieve a price at which they are willing to do so.
Imagine somebody who bought a house for £400,000 in 2022, perhaps having competed with several other buyers during the period when properties were attracting offers well above their asking prices.
Four years later, they decide to move, invite an estate agent to value the property and discover that the house might only sell for £380,000. Perhaps they put it on the market at £410,000 and receive no offers, reduce it to £395,000 and eventually decide that they would rather remain where they are than accept a loss.
That homeowner would not appear anywhere in my figures. There must have been people who found themselves in circumstances of this kind during 2026, although the Land Registry data cannot tell us how many. Quite a few houses in my area have appeared on the market and disappeared weeks later without being sold.
This does not necessarily mean that the actual proportion of homeowners making losses is even higher than my calculations suggest. People who sell within five years are not a random cross-section of homeowners, and some will have moved because of divorce, financial difficulties, employment changes or other circumstances that gave them limited flexibility over the timing of their sale.
Others may have spent substantial amounts improving their properties, meaning that the apparent capital gains recorded by the Land Registry overstate their financial returns even further.
The important point is that completed property transactions tell us what happened to properties that actually sold. They do not tell us how many people considered selling, how many withdrew their homes from the market or how many are sitting on unrealised losses.
What About People Who Have Owned Their Properties for Longer?
My analysis only concerns properties resold within five years of purchase, rather than everybody who sold a property during 2026. It tells us nothing about the returns enjoyed by people who have owned their houses for decades.
ValuQ found that, when properties held for longer periods were included, only 7.8% of all repeat sales during the first half of 2026 were completed for less than the original purchase price, compared with 16.3% among properties resold within five years.
However, both figures are nominal measures. Neither accounts for inflation or transaction costs, and neither can be directly compared with my inflation-adjusted figure of 76.5%.
Someone who bought a house for £100,000 in 1996 and sold it for £500,000 in 2026 is clearly in a very different position from someone who bought for £500,000 in 2022 and sold for the same amount four years later. Many long-term homeowners have enjoyed substantial real capital gains, and my analysis does not suggest otherwise.
Making a poor return on your property does not mean buying it was a bad decision. As I explored in my article A House, a Rental or a Travelodge – Which Makes You Richer?, owning a property is not necessarily the best way to accumulate wealth, particularly when the costs of ownership and alternative uses of the money are taken into account. A home provides somewhere to live, and an owner whose property delivered a negative real capital return might still have been better off than if they had rented. Conversely, mortgage interest, maintenance and other ownership costs could make the overall financial outcome worse. Borrowing also changes the return earned on the owner’s equity.
My calculations address a narrower question: did the property sell for enough to recover the purchasing power of the money spent buying and selling it?
For more than three-quarters of the recent resales examined here, the answer was no.
Conclusion: Can You Lose Money on Property?
My analysis of 44,680 properties resold during the first half of 2026 has found that 16.4% changed hands for less than their original purchase price, 32.2% failed to recover their estimated buying and selling costs, and 76.5% failed to generate a positive inflation-adjusted capital return after those costs.
That does not mean buying a property was a mistake, nor that three-quarters of those homeowners would have been better off renting. But what it demonstrates is that a homeowner can sell for tens of thousands of pounds more than they originally paid, consider it a successful investment and never realise that inflation and transaction costs have wiped out their entire gain.
Perhaps the old adage needs revising.
It turns out that you can lose money on property without your property ever losing value.
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