Property fall-through rate slows, but total bill tops £1 billion
New statistics from the House Buyer Bureau show collapsed sales dipped at the end of last year, but the annual rate was still up.
Fall through rates dropped at the end of last year even though the property market cooled, new figures reveal.
However, the total cost of fall through sales to sellers and buyers in 2022 topped £1 billion, according to property purchasing specialist the House Buyer Bureau.
This shocking figure of £1 billion is a 6.3% jump from the previous year, and it’s the fifth year in a row that this figure has increased, rising 75% from 2018.
The latest index for Q4 2022, shows that a slowing housing market did present a silver lining in the form of a reduction in fall-throughs; some 75,809 home buyers and sellers were subject to a property sale collapse, a 15.9% drop on the previous quarter.
Cost rise
However, while there may have been a reduction in both volume and cost on a quarterly basis, the number of property sales fall throughs seen in Q4 2022 were still 16.9% higher on an annual basis, with the average cost up 11.4%.
The cost associated with a property fall through also fell marginally by 0.8% to an average of £3,311. As a result, the total cost of sales to have collapsed during the final quarter of last year totalled just shy of £251 million, a substantial figure, but one that was 16.6% below the previous quarter.
Chris Hodgkinson, managing director at House Buyer Bureau says: “There’s no denying that the market has now started to cool and while this may bring its own concerns, a reduction in both sales volumes and house prices during the final stages of last year has, at least, seen a drop in the number of transactions that are collapsing on a quarterly basis.”
Read more about sales fall-throughs.
