UK property market bounces back after last week’s summer wobble

After last week’s unexpected drop in sales agreed, the UK property market has bounced back. 24.4k homes went sold subject to contract in Week 32 , up from around the unexpected drop to 21.7k the week before and much closer to where we would expect the market to be at this point in August. The evidence increasingly suggests last week’s fall may simply have been a hangover from the hot weather, or higher numbers of people on holiday and the summer slowdown, rather than anything more sinister.

Yet beneath that headline, the market remains brutally price sensitive. Half the homes leaving estate agents’ books are still withdrawing unsold , while four out of five homes listed and sold so far in 2026 achieved that sale without needing a price reduction. The message is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore – getting the pricing strategy right from the beginning matters enormously.

This week in the YouTube video, I am joined by Iain White , one of the property industry’s most experienced operators, to dissect the numbers, graphs, charts and discuss where estate agents are getting it right and wrong.

Then Iain and myself head to Oxford , where we use cold, hard data to compare its estate agents on market share, exchanges, withdrawals, pricing, fall-throughs and the prices they actually achieve for their sellers and see who is the best estate agent in the city.

These are the main stats for week 32, week ending 16th August 2026.

32.6k new listings this week, ( 31.5k last week).

Weekly 2026 average: 36.4k .

10 year week 30 average: 33k

1.166m new listings YTD

0.3% lower than 2025 YTD (1.169m)

3.2% ahead of 2024 YTD (1.130m)

10.5% higher than the 2017–19 average YTD (1.059m).

24.4k homes sold STC this week 32 ( 21.8k last week)

10 year week 32 average: 25.2k

2026 weekly average: 24.6k

Year to date for house sales

786k UK homes sold STC YTD

7.1% lower than 2025 YTD (846k)

0.7% lower to 2024 YTD (792k)

10.8% higher than 2023 YTD (709k)

6% higher above pre-Covid 2017-19 years (742k)

Decade average – 784k YTD.

UK Net Resi Sales YTD

(Net sales being gross sales less sale fall-throughs)

18.2k net sales (16.9k last week)

10 year Week 32 average: 19.1k

Weekly average for 2026: 19.1k

609k UK net home sales YTD

5.7% lower than 2025 (647k)

0.4% lower than 2024 (612k)

13.5% ahead of 2023 (537k)

4.2% above the 2017–19 average (585k)

Exchanges & Withdrawals

Price difference between asking price of listings and asking price of those homes that go sold STC

House prices (£/sq.ft)

Local Focus this week in the show