Four in five flats aren't selling in six months. You can't market a flat like a terrace.
Zoopla's Richard Donnell says four out of five flat owners are struggling to sell within six months, against roughly half across the whole market. The cause is leasehold uncertainty, service charges and building safety, not weak desire. That makes the marketing job for a flat fundamentally different from the marketing job for a house.
Four out of five flats aren't selling within six months. Across the rest of the market it's about half.
If you've got flats sitting on your board right now you already knew that. You just didn't have the number, and now you do.
Richard Donnell of Zoopla put it out on the Today Programme yesterday morning, and he didn't dress it up. It is not easy out there if you are trying to sell a flat.
So here's the bit I'd push back on. The instinct is to read that as a demand problem, take it to the vendor, and have the price conversation. I'd say that's the wrong read, and it's the read that loses you the instruction in twelve weeks.
It's not a demand problem. It's an information problem, and information problems are marketing problems.
Look at what he actually blamed
Service charges. Ground rents. Leasehold reform. The cladding crisis and everything the building safety regime brought with it. And on the back of all of that, lenders going through flat applications with a much finer comb than they used to.
Not one of those is about whether people want to live in flats.
He also named the thing buyers are actually worried about, and this is the useful part. They're not just asking whether they can afford it and whether they'd like living there. They're asking what they're allowed to do with it, and what it's going to cost them for the whole time they own it.
You can see the result in the gap. The difference between a flat and a house in Britain is the widest it's been in thirty years. Donnell points out it's milder in Scotland, where far more stock is freehold, which tells you what you need to know. It's the tenure, not the buildings.
So your buyer isn't undecided about the flat. They're undecided about a pile of liabilities they can't see, can't price, and can't get anyone to confirm in writing.
Two bed terrace | Leasehold flat | |
What the buyer is resolving | Whether they want it | Whether they can safely own it |
The marketing job | Build desire | Remove risk |
Decisive assets | Photography, floorplan, location | Lease term, service charge history, works schedule |
Who else has to say yes | The buyer | The buyer, their lender and their solicitor |
Where the sale usually dies | Chain or survey | Week nine, on information that existed at week one |
Realistic buyer pool | Broad and local | Narrow and specific |
Best route to that pool | Portal listing | Own database, current tenants, deliberate local reach |
Sell a house and you're selling a feeling. The unknowns are small and most of them get settled the moment somebody stands in the kitchen and pictures themselves there.
Sell a flat and you're doing something else entirely. You're asking a stranger to underwrite a building they don't control, a management company they've never met and a cost base nobody will put in writing. Golden hour photography doesn't touch any of that, though I've watched plenty of agents give it a go.
And every week those questions stay unanswered is a week the buyer talks themselves out of it, or a lender says no, or a solicitor finds something that stops the lot.
There are eight questions. Answer them before you go live.
The good news is the uncertainty isn't mysterious. It's the same list every single time.
Lease length remaining, plus what an extension costs and how long it takes
Service charge this year, and what it was for the three years before that
Ground rent, and the review terms
Whether a Section 20 consultation (the process a freeholder has to run before billing leaseholders for major works over a set threshold) is live or coming
The reserve fund position
Who manages the building, and whether they answer the phone
The building safety and external wall position, including any EWS1 form (the assessment lenders use to judge cladding risk)
Whether the block is mortgageable right now, and on what terms
Now, most advice on this tells you to order the management pack at instruction. I'd be careful with that, because the seller pays for it, it's usually a few hundred pounds, it can take weeks to land, and half of it goes stale before you exchange.
Do it in two stages instead.
At instruction, get the answers for free. Your seller already has the lease, their last three service charge demands, their ground rent statements and every letter about major works sitting in a drawer. That's six of the eight, answered in one conversation, on day one, for nothing.
Order the formal pack when you go under offer, so it's current when the solicitor needs it rather than out of date.
Material information rules already make you put lease length, service charge and ground rent on the listing. Most agents treat that as a box to fill in as thinly as they can get away with. Treat it as the marketing instead, and you've removed six of the eight reasons that sale falls over.
That list isn't hard to put together. Putting it together on every flat instruction, every time, without it slipping the week the branch gets busy, is the hard bit. That's what we build for independent agents.
The lender is your second buyer, and nobody markets to them
Donnell's line about underwriting is the one the industry will skim straight past. It's also the one with the most money attached to it.
If lenders are looking harder at flats, then a decent share of that four in five were never buyer failures at all. They were mortgage failures. The buyer wanted it, offered on it, and couldn't get it funded against that building. And you found out three weeks after the offer went in.
Now, I'll be honest with you: there's no clean public source that tells you which lenders have recently lent on a given block. Don't go looking for one. But there are five things you can find out this afternoon.
Ask your seller who they borrowed from and whether it was straightforward. Free, and often the whole answer.
Ask the managing agent whether they know of lending restrictions or valuations getting pulled on the block.
Ask two or three local brokers whether they've placed a case in that building recently. Most will tell you, and you've just started a referral relationship worth having anyway.
Read the sold price record for the block over eighteen months. A building transacting regularly at proper prices is being lent on. One where sales have thinned out or gone cash-only is telling you something.
Get the building safety position in writing before you go live, because it's the most common reason a valuation gets pulled from under you.
None of that needs access you haven't got. All of it beats finding out the hard way.
Sell the building, and put the real monthly cost in the ad
Two things that feel wrong and aren't.
New homes marketing sells the development, not the plot. Resale flat marketing sells the unit and ignores the building completely, which is exactly the thing keeping your buyer awake. The block, the managing agent, the reserve fund, what's been done in the last five years, who actually lives there. All of it is part of what's being bought.
Then the harder one. Put the total monthly cost of ownership in the listing, not just the asking price.
Your buyer is doing that sum anyway. They're adding the service charge, adding the ground rent, pricing in the lease extension, and holding the total up against a house, which is precisely why that gap has stretched to a thirty year high.
Publishing the whole number doesn't lose you the buyer who was going to pull out at week six. It loses them in week one, before you've spent a penny of the marketing budget on them, and it keeps the ones who were always going to complete. I'd take that trade every time.
The pool is narrower, so go and find it
A two bed terrace has a wide, obvious, local buyer pool who are already looking. Sticking it on a portal is a perfectly reasonable way to meet them.
A flat's pool is narrower. First time buyers who've already got a broker involved. Downsizers who want lock up and leave. Investors reading the yield before they look at a single photograph. And people already renting in that postcode, who know the building, know the neighbours, and have already made peace with the trade-off.
That last group is sitting in your own lettings database right now, and it's the most under-used asset in an independent agency. Ask me how many agents market to their own tenants properly. It isn't many.
The same information problem is running through new build too, where 4,400 homes have now sat unsold for six months.
What this changes at the valuation
Here's the commercial bit, and it's the reason I'd act on this rather than just nod at it.
Four in five flats not selling in six months, against a sole agency period of twelve to sixteen weeks, means the flat instruction is now the highest churn instruction on your books. You'll do the work, you'll carry the cost, and somebody else will list it in the spring.
So change the valuation. Not the fee, and not the price. The plan. Here's exactly what we'll have ready before this goes live, here's what happened to the last four flats in this block, here's what that does to your odds.
That wins you an instruction against an agent quoting less, and you'll still have it in month five.
We work with one agent per postcode sector and we don't move off it.
When we build this for you, we're not building it for the agent three streets away next month.
Common questions
Why are flats taking so much longer to sell than houses?
Zoopla puts it down to weaker demand and greater uncertainty around leasehold specifically: service charge levels, ground rents, government reform and building safety, followed by lenders underwriting flats more cautiously. The effect is smaller in Scotland, where freehold is far more common, which points at the tenure rather than the buildings themselves.
Should I reduce the price on a flat that isn't selling?
Not as a first move. Price is the lever most agents grab for, but the evidence points at uncertainty rather than value. Answering the lease, service charge, works and lending questions costs almost nothing and removes the reasons a buyer hesitates. Reduce afterwards if you still need to, on better information.
What should be prepared before a flat goes on the market?
Get the free answers from your seller at instruction: the lease, three years of service charge demands, ground rent terms and any major works correspondence. Order the formal management pack when you go under offer, so it's current when the solicitor needs it rather than expired.
Does publishing the service charge put buyers off?
It puts off the buyers who were going to withdraw anyway, and it does it in week one instead of week nine. Buyers are already working out the full monthly cost. Making them find it late doesn't protect the sale, it just moves the collapse further down the line, after you've spent the budget.
The point
Four in five isn't a verdict on flats. It's a verdict on marketing a flat as though it were a house.
Your buyer isn't asking to be persuaded. They're asking to be reassured, in writing, before they commit. And almost nothing in a standard listing does that.
Fix that before the photographer turns up, not after.
If the flats on your board are sitting, we'll tell you what's wrong with how those instructions are being marketed, and then we'll fix it with you. We're better at this than most people you've paid before, and we don't mind saying so.
Written by Adam Graver, Co-founder, House of Marque
Adam has spent a decade in estate agency marketing, most recently as Head of Marketing at the UK's largest property franchise group. He works across search visibility, generative search, email, CRM and sector legislation, and has run marketing across national agency networks rather than advised on it from the outside.
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