Latest housing market problem - sales of £1m-plus homes stall

It’s unlikely to bring out the violins but the number of properties sold for £1m or more in Britain rose only one per cent in 2018, ending a decade of far more substantial growth.

A new survey by Lloyds Bank shows that this is directly linked to the flattening of year on year sales in London; there were 8,267 homes sold in 2018, compared to an all-time high of 8,308 in 2017. 

There was also no measurable growth in the South East with 3,390 £1m homes sold in 2018, just up from the 3,377 sold in 2017.

In addition, London experienced a 3.0 per cent drop in the number of £2m-plus homes sold, reducing from 1,946 to 1,886 over the course of the year, although this is still up 188 per cent from a decade ago.

The biggest fall across Great Britain was in Yorkshire and Humberside, with £1m home sales dropping by 23 per cent from 2017, (133 homes sold in 2017 to 103 in 2018). 

The South West experienced a fall of one per cent, from 676 homes in 2017 to 668 in 2018.

Despite the slow-down, the total number of homes sold for more than a million pounds in Great Britain was 14,638, the highest number ever recorded. 

The number of houses sold for more than two million pounds was down slightly, from 2,530 in 2017 to 2,501 in 2018.

While transactions in the capital remained flat last year, those in the East Midlands rose by 39 per cent in the same period. Precisely 100 £1m homes were sold in the East Midlands in 2018, a dramatic increase from the 49 sold in 2008.

Sales in the West Midlands were up by 13 per cent and other regions experiencing positive growth included Scotland (up 14 per cent), the North West (up nine per cent), Wales (also up nine per cent) and the North East (up four per cent). 

However, given London and the South East made up the vast majority of all £1m-plus sales in Great Britain, the flat results in these regions out-weighed positive gains elsewhere.