Essex’s Slowest and Fastest Home Sale Markets Revealed

19 Apr Essex’s Slowest and Fastest Home Sale Markets Revealed

Professional house buying firm Property Solvers’ speed of sale tool has revealed that it’s taking an average of 16.11 weeks to sell a property across Essex.

Updated monthly, the latest dataset analysed over 2,796 property sales across the region between April 2020 and April 2021.

The statistics track the moment a property is listed on the UK’s largest property portal Rightmove to the point it’s marked as officially ‘sold’ at the HM Land Registry.

As shown in the table below, properties were selling the fastest in Canvey Island (SS8), Rochford (SS4) and Epping (CM16) adopting a minimum number of 20 property sales in a given area.  In the top 10 areas, Property Solvers revealed that homes took 93.30 days (13.33 weeks) to sell on average.

Homes were selling the slowest in the Harwich (CO12), Basildon (SS16) and Colchester (CO3) postcodes (also sampling a minimum data set of 20 property sales).  In the bottom 10 postcodes, the data showed that properties were taking 127.10 days (18.16 weeks) to sell on average.

Property Solvers co-founder, Ruban Selvanayagam commented: “Despite the broad level of inactivity under the first COVID-19 lockdown, the estate agency industry has recovered relatively quickly.”

“Whilst buyer demand certainly hasn’t waned as many predicted, the time for house transactions to complete has certainly lengthened.”

“Many solicitors, mortgage brokers and other professionals in our sector have been working from home which has often resulted in further administrative and other operational delays.  However, with restrictions gradually being lifted, and more people returning to office, the property buying and selling process should hopefully accelerate,” he continued.

Nonetheless, Selvanayagam concluded, many of the processes remain slow and archaic – “an issue that’s likely to continue post-pandemic.”