One in eight new builds is unsold after six months. The price is not the problem.
Research from Octane Capital found 13% of England's new build listings have been on the market for more than six months, while only 14.5% have had an asking price reduction. Developers are holding value and refinancing to buy time. The third option, marketing the scheme to buyers who are not yet searching, is going unexamined.
There's a particular atmosphere in a sales cabin in month seven.
Nobody says anything unkind. The coffee still gets made. But everyone in the room knows the numbers, and the conversation has quietly moved from how do we sell these to how long can we hold.
If you're running a scheme of 10 to 200 units, you know exactly the room I mean.
Research published this morning puts a number on how common it's become. Octane Capital looked at more than 1,100 live new build listings across England. A quarter had been marketed for over three months. Thirteen per cent for more than six. Four per cent for over a year.
Scaled up against the 34,831 new build homes currently listed in England, that's roughly 4,400 homes waiting more than six months for someone to buy them.
There's a figure buried in that research that nobody's picked up, and once you see it, the story stops being the one everyone's telling.
It's the 14.5%
Only 14.5% of those listings had seen an asking price reduction.
Which means that for something like 85% of unsold new build stock in England, price hasn't actually been tested. It's being held. Deliberately, and for reasons any developer would recognise.
Jonathan Samuels of Octane Capital is straightforward about why. Every discount comes off the bottom line, and after years of planning, construction and build costs going one way, protecting profitability matters more than it used to.
Then he says something easy to read past. Buyer demand is still there.
So line those three up. Demand exists. Price hasn't moved. The homes still aren't selling.
That isn't a pricing problem and it isn't the market. It's a reach problem, which is a far less comfortable thing to admit in a board meeting, because you can't refinance your way out of it.
The sentiment data says the same thing from another angle. Fifty-seven per cent of developers say they're less likely to start new schemes this year, and 83% expect to lean on specialist finance to get through.
Two columns, and everyone's working in one of them
Developer exit finance does what it says on the tin. Refinance the completed scheme, repay the original facility, release the working capital, carry on selling without a loan maturity date forcing your hand at the worst possible moment.
That's a good product and a sensible answer to a cash flow problem. None of this is an argument against it.
What I'd say is that the entire industry conversation about 4,400 unsold homes is happening in the finance column, and almost none of it is happening in the marketing one.
Refinancing buys you time. Time is only useful if you do something different with it, and six more months of the same activity gets you six more months of the same result.
If you're weighing up a discount, know what it really costs
Worth saying out loud, because it explains why so many developers end up frozen.
A price cut doesn't just cost you the discount on plot 14. It resets the comparable for every plot behind it, and it quietly tells the eleven people who already reserved that they paid over the odds. I've watched a sales office deal with the fallout from that one, and it isn't a fun week.
An incentive does none of it. Same value in the buyer's pocket, headline price untouched, comparables intact, and the people who reserved back in March still think they got a good deal. Which, because you protected the scheme, they did.
Stamp duty paid. Upgraded spec. Service charge covered for two years. Part exchange. Deposit contribution. Most developers reach for the discount because it's the lever nearest the hand, not because it's the better one.
Knowing an incentive beats a discount is the easy part.
Structuring one that actually moves reservations without eroding the scheme is the bit developers ask us for.
Portals meet buyers at the end. The decision happens a long way before that.
A portal listing is a shelf. It puts your homes in front of people who are already searching that postcode, in that price band, that week.
Useful. It's distribution and it works. But it only ever catches people at the very end of their thinking.
The person who's going to reserve plot 14 decided they wanted a new build months before they typed a postcode into anything. They decided when the second baby arrived, when the lease renewal landed on the mat, when the promotion came through, when a parent got ill and the stairs became a problem.
For most SME developers, that entire window is a blank. No list, no audience, nothing. The scheme turns up on the portals at practical completion, competes on the shelf with everything else in the area, and the clock starts.
Six months of listing is six months of being seen by the same finite pool of people who were already looking. If that pool didn't produce a buyer in month one, I wouldn't bank on month seven.
The same thing is playing out in resale, incidentally. Four in five flats are now failing to sell within six months, and for reasons that are also about information rather than desire.
What I'd do with the six months instead
If you're refinancing to buy time, here's where the time should go.
Build the list before the ground breaks. Registered interest is the most valuable thing a developer can own, and it survives the scheme. Most SME developers start from zero on every single site and then wonder why launches are slow. The ones who don't start from zero launch faster every time.
Ask the people already living there. Residents on your completed schemes are the cheapest and most credible source of buyers you have, and hardly anyone asks them. They chose you once, they know what the build quality is actually like once you've lived in it through a winter, and they talk to people at the same stage of life.
Write down who the buyer is, beyond a price band. The realistic audience for a 40 unit scheme is small and entirely findable. It's rarely a budget problem. It's usually that nobody's ever put it on paper.
Use AI where it earns its keep. Not for churning out more content. For keeping 400 interested people warm without a marketing team, matching plots to circumstances, and chasing the enquiries that went quiet at week three (which, in my experience, is most of them).
Give people a reason to decide now. Structured incentive windows, referral rewards for existing residents, something that makes this month better than next month.
Every one of those is doable. Doing all five, consistently, while you're also running a site, is the bit that doesn't happen. That's the job we take on. We build the plan and then we run it with you, and we work with one developer per postcode sector, so the scheme we're marketing this month is never competing with the one we marketed last.
The sum worth doing on your own scheme
Exit finance is priced monthly and carried for as long as the units sit there. Marketing is priced monthly too.
So the question answers itself on your own numbers. What's one more month of finance costing on this scheme, and what would that same money buy you in front of the people most likely to reserve plot 14?
They aren't alternatives, by the way. Most developers in this position need both. It's just that only one of them is currently being talked about.
Common questions
Why are new build homes taking longer to sell in 2026?
Octane Capital's research suggests it isn't primarily price, since roughly 85% of unsold listings have never had a reduction. Longer selling periods fit better with limited buyer reach: schemes relying on portal listings and sales agent relationships only meet buyers right at the end of the decision, when competition is at its highest.
Should developers cut asking prices on unsold new build stock?
A reduction does more damage than the discount itself. It resets the comparable value of every remaining plot and undermines the buyers who already reserved. Structured incentives put the same value in the buyer's pocket without touching the headline price or the scheme's comparables, which is usually why they're the better tool.
What marketing should a developer be doing before a scheme completes?
Building a registered interest list is the priority, and it should start well before practical completion. That list is an asset that carries over to the next scheme, which is what turns each launch into a faster one than the last.
Is developer exit finance a bad decision?
Not at all. It's a sensible response to a cash flow problem and it does exactly what it claims. The issue is that right now it's the only response being discussed. Time only helps if the activity during that time changes.
The point
Four thousand four hundred homes in England have spent more than six months waiting for a buyer, and the whole conversation about it is a finance conversation.
The homes are built. The demand is there. The price is being held for perfectly good reasons.
What's missing is the work that should have started before the ground did.
The homes are ready. The marketing should be too. If your scheme has stopped moving, the quickest thing we can do is tell you exactly why, in writing, before you commit to anything. No spam. No automated phone system. Just us.
Written by Lucy Collinge, Co-founder, House of Marque Lucy started on the front line of estate agency sales before moving into senior marketing roles in new homes and digital marketing.
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