Britain Saw 3,000 Asking-Price Cuts a Day in September — and Reduced Homes Are Half as Likely to Sell Within Three Months

Rightmove figures shared exclusively with the BBC put September's average at more than 3,000 asking-price cuts a day across Britain — the property website's highest figure for any month in 15 years, which it attributed in part to a glut of homes on the market and in part to sellers setting unrealistic expectations. Zoopla's Richard Donnell said properties that needed a price reduction were half as likely to find a buyer within the normal three-month timeframe, compared with those that did not need one. Donnell is Zoopla's executive director of research, and the claim is his company's finding rather than an independently audited one — worth keeping in mind given how neatly it flatters a portal that lists homes at their first price and watches what happens next. Still, the pattern is the interesting part. A reduction is usually imagined as a rescue: the seller blinks, the price becomes competitive, buyers move. In this data the reduced homes are the slow ones, which is what you would expect in a market where the original number does the filtering. A listing that reads as expensive gets skimmed past, and by the time the price moves, some of the search attention has already gone elsewhere.