The average UK house now costs 1.7 times as much as the average flat — the widest gap on record.
Outside London, that ratio climbs to 2.3, and in the West Midlands it hits 2.5. Since 2016, the average house has gained 43% in value. The average flat has gained just 10%.
That gap isn’t really about bedrooms or square footage. It’s about tenure. Almost every flat in England and Wales is sold leasehold, and leasehold flats have become a genuine liability in a way they simply weren’t a decade ago.
Two forces are doing most of the damage to leasehold flats: leases running down toward the point where mortgage lenders won’t touch them, and a wave of building safety regulation that, however well-intentioned, has made many of them slower, costlier and riskier to sell. Reform is coming for both problems but it just isn’t here yet — and sellers are living with the consequences in the meantime.
A market that’s openly admitting it’s broken
Estate agents aren’t being subtle about this anymore. Propertymark’s new Leasehold: still a life sentence? report, published in mid-July 2026 and based on evidence from over 1,200 leaseholders and 200 of its member agents, found that 93% of leaseholders surveyed would not buy a leasehold property again. Fewer than 1% of agents said selling leasehold flats had become easier over the past two years. More than 78% had taken at least one leasehold flat off the market entirely because it simply wasn’t going to sell, and around 74% pointed to onerous service charges as the main obstacle.
The clearest evidence that leasehold itself — not just flats in general — is the problem comes from Scotland, which never adopted England and Wales’s long-leasehold system. Scottish flats currently sell in around 15 days. The UK-wide average for flats is 40 days, according to Zoopla data cited by Propertymark. Same property type, same basic appeal to buyers, wildly different outcomes — because one market carries the baggage of ground rent, service charges and lease length, and the other doesn’t. The typical English or Welsh leaseholder now pays around £200 a year in ground rent and £1,900 in service charges, a combined £2,100 that a freeholder simply doesn’t have to budget for.
The 80-year cliff edge
The single most damaging number in leasehold is 80. Once a lease drops below 80 years remaining, a legal mechanism called “marriage value” kicks in, entitling the freeholder to roughly half of the theoretical increase in the property’s worth once the lease is extended. In practice, this means extension premiums that were merely expensive suddenly become brutal — often jumping into the tens of thousands of pounds for what might be only a few years’ difference in lease length.
Mortgage lenders know this, which is why lease length has become one of the sharpest lines in UK property finance. Criteria vary by lender, but the shape of the market is consistent: most mainstream lenders want at least 70–85 years remaining at the point of application, and many also require a minimum number of years left over at the end of the mortgage term — commonly 30 to 35. Nationwide, for example, will go as low as 55 years remaining, but only if at least 30 years will still be left once the mortgage is paid off. Drop below roughly 70 years, and the pool of lenders willing to even consider the property narrows sharply; go much lower than that, and you’re generally looking at specialist lenders demanding deposits as large as 45%, rather than the 25% a standard buyer might expect.
The practical effect for a seller is straightforward and severe: a flat with a short lease isn’t being marketed to the whole pool of interested buyers, only to the shrinking subset who can either pay cash or qualify for increasingly specialist, increasingly expensive finance. Every year a lease isn’t extended, that subset gets smaller.
If your lease is already below that 70–80 year threshold and mainstream lenders are turning buyers away, waiting for the market to catch up isn’t really a strategy. A direct cash sale with Any House Wanted sidesteps the lending problem entirely, since there’s no mortgage to qualify for in the first place. Call us free to find out more on 0800 389 7305 or get started with your cash offer.
Rules built to protect leaseholders have also made leasehold flats harder to sell
The Building Safety Act 2022 exists for a serious reason. Introduced after the Grenfell Tower fire, it makes developers and freeholders responsible for fixing historical safety defects — like combustible cladding — rather than passing the bill to leaseholders who had no part in causing the problem. For buildings of 11 metres or five storeys and above, “qualifying leaseholders” are protected from most historical remediation costs. That protection matters enormously to the people who have it.
But the Act has also added a genuinely new layer of friction to selling. Whether a lease qualifies for protection depends on a snapshot of ownership and occupation taken on a single date — 14 February 2022 — and proving that status now requires a Leaseholder Deed of Certificate from the seller and a Landlord Certificate from the freeholder, generated specifically for that transaction. Get it wrong, or fail to obtain it in time, and a sale can stall. Buildings can also contain a mix of qualifying and non-qualifying leases side by side — meaning two otherwise identical flats in the same block can carry very different financial exposure, and very different appeal to a cautious buyer’s solicitor.
Layered on top of that is the physical reality most of this legislation was written to address. As of the end of May 2026, government figures show 4,411 residential buildings in England 11 metres and over still identified with unsafe cladding. Just 38% have fully completed remediation works; the rest are somewhere between not yet started and in progress. New government funding for buildings under 11 metres opens for applications in mid-August 2026, extending the same slow-moving process to a whole additional tier of smaller blocks.
The knock-on cost is insurance, and it doesn’t reliably go away even once a building is fixed. A government-backed survey of over 2,000 buildings in remediation programmes found average insurance rates of 0.14% for buildings with flammable cladding or other defects, against 0.09% where none were reported — with around 3,200 homes facing premiums above £1,800 a year, and some buildings carrying excesses of £1 million or more. High-rise insurance costs overall rose 125% in the years following Grenfell, per a 2022 FCA investigation, in a market where fewer than 20 insurers were willing to cover mid- and high-rise blocks even before the fire. Propertymark’s own research is the more troubling detail: of buildings where defects had actually been remediated, 60% saw no change in their insurance premium at all, and only 6% saw it fall to reflect the reduced risk. Fixing the building, in other words, often isn’t enough to fix what it costs to insure — or to sell.
That matters most at the point of finance. More than half of Propertymark members who’d struggled to sell a flat affected by cladding said the main barrier wasn’t a buyer walking away — it was a lender refusing to lend, because it couldn’t get comfortable with the safety status, the remediation timeline, or the leaseholder’s future exposure to costs.
The legal bill lands before the sale does
None of this is cheap to navigate, even before a buyer is found. Property Solvers’ annual survey of 100 conveyancing firms puts the average 2026 leasehold sale fee at £1,629, against £1,317 for freehold — roughly 24% more, and that’s before the Building Safety Act certificates, leasehold management packs, and additional freeholder correspondence that a straightforward freehold sale never has to touch. Leasehold purchase fees run about 25% higher than freehold for the same reason on the buyer’s side. It’s an unglamorous cost, but it’s a real one — extra hundreds of pounds and extra weeks of back-and-forth, layered onto a transaction that was already carrying more risk than a freehold sale to begin with.
Reform is coming. It just isn’t here yet.
The frustrating part is that Parliament has already legislated a fix for the worst of this — it just hasn’t arrived. The Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 received Royal Assent in May 2024 and promises to abolish marriage value entirely and extend the standard lease extension to 990 years at a peppercorn rent, which would remove the 80-year cliff edge that currently distorts so much of the short-lease market.
In practice, none of that is in force yet. Six freeholder groups — reportedly including some of London’s largest historic estates — challenged the abolition of marriage value as incompatible with their property rights. The High Court dismissed that challenge in October 2025, but the Court of Appeal has since granted permission to appeal, with a hearing not expected until spring 2027. A separate government consultation on the valuation rates that will determine exactly how much cheaper extensions become doesn’t close until 23 September 2026. And in July 2026, the Housing Minister told a parliamentary committee that the government’s formal response to its own pre-legislative scrutiny would be delayed, in part because of a change in political leadership over the summer that had disrupted the usual pace of government business.
None of this means reform won’t happen. The direction of travel — abolishing marriage value, capping ground rent, promoting commonhold as a genuine alternative to leasehold — is about as settled as government policy gets. But “settled in principle” and “usable by someone trying to sell their flat this year” are two very different things, and the gap between them is currently measured in years, not months.
What this actually means if you’re trying to sell now
Put these threads together and the picture for anyone holding a short lease, or a flat in a building still waiting on remediation, is genuinely difficult. The pool of buyers who can get a mortgage on the property shrinks the further the lease runs down. The legal cost of getting to completion is a quarter higher than a comparable freehold sale before anything unusual even comes up. Building safety certificates add a procedural step that a freehold sale never has to clear. Insurance costs can stay elevated even after the underlying defect is fixed. And the legislative fixes that would ease all of this are, at best, eighteen months to two years from being fully usable — assuming the ongoing litigation doesn’t push that further out.
For flats that don’t fall into these categories — long lease, remediated or unaffected building, reasonable service charge — none of this applies, and a conventional sale remains the right route. But for the flats that do, the honest read of the current market is that waiting for reform to solve the problem isn’t a strategy most sellers can afford to rely on.
This is exactly the situation where a direct cash sale earns its place as a genuine option rather than a last resort. Any House Wanted buys properties directly, which means a short lease or an unresolved cladding question doesn’t rule out a sale the way it does with a mortgage-dependent buyer — there’s no lender to satisfy, no chain to collapse, and no months-long wait for a Leaseholder Deed of Certificate to clear a buyer’s solicitor.
Two questions tend to come up at this point:
- Will Any House Wanted as a cash buyer actually take on a flat with a short lease or an open cladding question? Yes, since the entire obstacle for a mainstream sale is lender risk appetite, and a cash purchase removes the lender from the transaction.
- Will the offer reflect the discount a short lease or building safety issue already applies to the property, or is that being priced in twice? At Any House Wanted, we prioritise fairness. All our offers reflect the full price we’re able to pay, taking into account any building safety or lease extension requirements.
As a member of The Property Ombudsman and rated Excellent on Trustpilot, we set out our full process in our Frequently Asked Questions.
If you’re holding a leasehold flat that the open market currently can’t move, it’s worth finding out what a direct, no-obligation cash offer actually looks like before committing to another round of viewings that go nowhere.
