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Selling this year If you want to be under offer this year, September is the monthI'd like to share a conversation I've had a few times recently. A homeowner has been meaning to move since the spring, the summer has gone the way summer goes, and now they want to know whether it's too late to do anything about it this year. It comes down to three things:
1. Your ideal timeline There are two important numbers in a sale, but most people only think about the first one. The first is how long it takes to find a buyer. Rightmove's July figures put that at an average of 70 days in London (which is about ten weeks). The second is how long it takes to get from a handshake to the keys, which is usually another twelve to sixteen weeks, assuming the chain behaves itself. So from the board going up to the removal van, something close to five months is realistic. Here's where that leaves you, depending on when you start: Working backwards from today
*Every chain is different, and the market goes quiet either side of Christmas and takes a few weeks to wake up again. September and October aren't interchangeable. One gets you under offer with room to spare. The other is you trying to agree on a price in the fortnight when everyone is thinking about Christmas. The worst fortnight of the year to be negotiating. 2. Why the Budget on 28 October matters The Autumn Budget is on 28 October, and there's a great deal of speculation about what it might hold for property. I'm not going to add to it, because nobody knows yet. What I can tell you is what buyers tend to do in the weeks around a Budget. They wait and see. A home that's already on the market, being viewed and in conversation with a buyer tends to carry its momentum through that. A home that launches in the first week of November launches into the pause. 3. What to do if your home isn't ready yet Most homes aren't, and that's normal. It's completely okay if your home isn't ready to go on the market just yet. Most homes have a list of jobs that have been waiting to be done, a room that doesn't photograph particularly well, or paperwork that needs finding before you can move forward. The important thing is to be realistic about what actually needs doing before you sell and what can wait. Your home doesn't need to be perfect before you put it on the market. The mistake isn't taking a little time to get things ready, it's letting a few unfinished jobs become a reason to put the whole process off for months, especially when those jobs could be sorted relatively quickly. If you're thinking about selling, focus on what genuinely matters, deal with the essentials, and don't let small, fixable things become an excuse to wait until spring. A property listing that goes live before it's ready is in a worse position than one that waited a fortnight and launched properly. Buyers can see how long something has been listed and they draw their own conclusions from it. Reducing the price later rarely reverses that impression, and often just confirms it. So the honest answer to “should I wait?” is almost always: wait two weeks, not six months. And the useful thing to know before you decide either way is what your home is actually worth now and what a realistic timeline looks like for your street, rather than an average one. That's where we can help. We'll come round, give you an honest figure based on what's selling near you, and tell you plainly which jobs are worth doing before you launch and which aren't worth the money. It takes about twenty minutes, and there's no obligation to instruct us at the end of it.
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