'I would sell it for £1 if I could. It's like being in prison': MARK PALMER lays bare the true scale of the UK's unsellable homes crisis - from retirees who can't downsize to the flat owners stuck in their starter properties

Kate Williams has reached boiling point – and it has nothing to do with the summer’s relentless heatwaves.Her husband died at the start of the year after suffering from severe dementia, leaving her alone in their five-bedroom detached home on the Northamptonshire/Lincolnshire border, near the town of Stamford.‘After a few months, I realised that the best thing was to put the house on the market and start again in some ways,’ says Mrs Williams, 67, who recently retired as a military tailor.She has two children, one living in Australia, the other in the Isle of Man, and is keen to downsize, a move that would give her the wherewithal to travel and spend time with her five grandchildren.As it happens, she and her late husband had arranged for a valuation of the house a few months before he died, with various estate agents agreeing that it was worth between £1.15million to £1.2million in a normal marketplace.But, of course, there’s been nothing normal about 2026 so far and there is little reason to think it will become so during what’s left of this grim year of economic stagnation and musical chairs in Downing Street.So, Mrs Williams’s house, with its floor area of nearly 3,000 sq ft, double garages, off-street parking and substantial landscaped garden, was on the market with By Design, an international estate agents, for £1million in early May.‘There was no interest whatsoever,’ says Kate. ‘I held out for about 13 weeks and then decided to drop the price to £950,000, but I did so with a heavy heart because it’s a lovely family home in excellent condition and in a village with a school, shop and church.’ 'Mansion tax police’ from HM Revenue & Customs will be able to enter people’s homes to assess how much they are worthDropping the price by £50,000 also made no difference. In fact, it resulted in just one viewing. And so, this week, feeling slightly desperate and following discussions with By Design, it was decided to reduce the price further to £900,000.‘What this means is that someone out there will be getting a bargain,’ said Mrs Williams. ‘But I’ve no idea if it’s going to happen.‘I just know I need to start a new life, probably back in Yorkshire where I come from originally.’What’s making her blood boil is not simply that no one wants to buy her house, but the underlying reasons for the collapse in property prices.It is, she believes, down to the ‘sheer incompetence of the Government’ over the past two years.Last week, it was reported that ‘mansion tax police’ from HM Revenue & Customs will be able to enter people’s homes to assess how much they are worth. The tax concocted by former chancellor Rachel Reeves will be enforced from April 2028 and charge an extra levy of between £2,500 and £7,500 a year to those in homes worth £2million-plus.However, it has been speculated that Burnham could lower the threshold to £1.5million.‘A sense of fear is gripping people,’ says Kate. ‘No one knows what Andy Burnham really wants to do.‘All this talk of a mansion tax and clobbering high earners is eating away at confidence and the uncertainty is beginning to cause major issues. It needs something radical like reducing stamp duty.’There is little chance of that happening. Last month, the Prime Minister ruled out an overhaul of property taxes in the next Budget, which is due on October 28, but – long-term – Mr Burnham has made clear he wants to change how property and land is taxed.In the past, the former Manchester mayor has called for the scrapping of stamp duty, instead opting for a land value tax – an annual levy based solely on the value of the land itself, excluding any buildings or improvements on the property.Currently, stamp duty is the tax paid by homebuyers on properties or land worth more than £125,000 – or £300,000 in the case of first-time buyers – in England and Northern Ireland.The Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think-tank, has described stamp duty as ‘one of the most economically damaging taxes’. While Kemi Badenoch said last year that a future Conservative government would abolish the tax on main homes.Then there are the unwelcome hints that the threshold of Burnham’s much-loved mansion tax might be lowered from £2million to £1.5million, which will further put off buyers.The PM does not have much room for manoeuvre. He has promised to stick to Labour’s 2024 manifesto pledges not to raise income tax, VAT and National Insurance, but has to find money from somewhere to pay, in particular, for investment in social care and an increase in defence spending.All this uncertainty is of no help to Mrs Williams and the thousands of other people who want to sell their home, but not at any price.Meanwhile, buyers are put off by the idea of purchasing a property without knowing what the tax implications might be this time next year.No wonder Anthony Codling, a managing director at RBC Capital Markets, says the UK housing market has fallen into ‘suspended animation’.And Lloyds, Britain’s biggest mortgage lender, said this week that house prices have ‘flatlined’, with buyers facing an ‘uncertain economic backdrop’. Something of an understatement.‘Affordability remains a challenge for many would-be buyers and, following recent events in the Middle East, mortgage rates have edged higher again after easing earlier in the summer,’ says Amanda Bryden, director of mortgages at Lloyds.As a result, mortgage approvals remain significantly below their ten-year average, with Bank of England data showing they are running at 10 per cent lower than a year ago.To make matters worse, there’s growing evidence that, with prices falling, mortgage interest rates still high and moving fees increasing, more and more people are staying put. Hence the moribund market place.A poll of 2,000 homeowners conducted by Evolution Money, a specialist UK secured home loan lender, found that 61 per cent said they would rather upgrade their current property than move in the next five years. Kate Williams’s house has a floor area of nearly 3,000 sq ft, double garages, off-street parking and substantial landscaped garden, was on the market for £1million in early May Retired violinist Marius Bedeschi outside his home in Stoke Ferry, Norfolk. Zoopla reported demand for cottages of the kind he owns has fallen by more than a third Marius Bedeschi, a retired professional violinist and former Alfredo Campoli Chair at the Royal Welsh College of Music, is not one of them. He lives in a 17th-century, three-bedroom period cottage in Norfolk village Stoke Ferry, which he has restored in meticulous detail. And wants to sell.Some of the wooden beams in his gem of a property go back to 1550, there’s a huge inglenook fireplace and Mr Bedeschi has worked tirelessly to create a magnificent walled garden. He put the house on the market in October 2025 for £460,000 with a firm called Norfolk Agents – and in five months only had three viewings.‘Most of those were people who just wanted something to do. They were day trippers, really,’ says Mr Bedeschi.‘One of them didn’t like it because there was no room for a pony and another asked where was the open-plan lounge – when they could have seen there was no open-plan lounge from the online details’.In March, he switched to Sowerbys, a bigger and well-respected Norfolk estate agent, and dropped the price to £450,000. That didn’t work either – and so in June the price was decreased further to £420,000. ‘I realised if I went to £400,000 I would get silly offers of £380,000 but at least if I kept it at £420,000 I might get an offer of £400,000 or so,’ said Mr Bedeschi.Last week, he did indeed receive an offer of £400,000, which he rejected. The prospective buyers raised their offer to £410,000 but Mr Bedeschi rejected that, too, and now they have agreed on £420,000 subject to survey. His fingers are crossed.He said: ‘It’s quite obvious the country is in general decline and so people are holding off – and who can blame them? I have found the whole thing stressful but also frustrating because there’s a pent-up wish to buy out there but it needs to be released.’There is discouraging news for Mr Bedeschi from Zoopla, which this week reported that demand for cottages of the kind he owns – which soared in price during the pandemic when people flocked to the countryside for a more bucolic lifestyle – has fallen by more than a third over the past three years.The property crisis – and, whatever some agents may tell you, it is a crisis, with massive knock-on effects – does have a potential upside for those first-time buyers who are prepared to take a risk on whatever Burnham and his Chancellor are cooking up in Whitehall.Dexters in south-east London has several one-bedroom flats for sale with asking prices of £350,000 and some owners are open to offers well below that.‘There is a big opportunity at the moment for first-time buyers,’ says Oliver Carrwhite, a negotiator in Dexters’ New Cross branch. ‘These flats were on the market for around £25,000 more a year ago.’Even so, some 80 per cent of flats do not sell within six months, according to Zoopla, as buyers turn their backs on one and two bedroom apartments – especially those in new, high-rise buildings.Shoddy workmanship, fears about cladding, exorbitant service charges and the financial burden of stamp duty are just some of the reasons for this.In the city centres of Sheffield, Birmingham, Leicester and Newcastle, flat owners are selling at a loss of almost £40,000 on average, according to Land Registry data.Stacey Lofthouse has been trying to sell the two-bedroom flat in Lancaster, where she and her husband live, for eight years. Did you know? Stamp duty for buying the average-priced home in England now stands at £4,572, according to Coventry Building Society. They bought it in 2009 for £150,000 but are looking to sell for around £125,000.At first, the issue was the high-risk cladding, which led to a sale collapsing on five different occasions. The cladding has been sorted out but still it won’t shift.A big disincentive for potential buyers is the ground rent and service charges.Back in 2009, the Lofthouses were paying £295 a year in ground rent and now they are charged £590, with another rise in January when it comes to £885 a year.Their service charge amounts to nearly £2,200 a year.‘We’re just stuck here – we have tried everything,’ says Mrs Lofthouse, who works as a postgraduate research co-ordinator at Lancaster University.‘I would sell it for a £1 if I could just pay my mortgage and get out but I can’t. It’s like being in prison.’Selling is clearly problematic but buying can be a headache, too.‘Affordability remains one of the biggest hurdles to getting on to the property ladder,’ says Colleen Babcock, Rightmove’s property expert. ‘While it appears that changes to property taxes have been ruled out for now, any measures in October’s Budget that can improve affordability would be very welcome’.Hence, the clarion call for, at the very least, a stamp duty holiday to stimulate the market, just like the one introduced in July 2020 by the then Chancellor Rishi Sunak during the dark days of Covid.By raising the tax-free threshold to £500,000, Sunak almost immediately created a huge sales boom – although it also pushed some house prices up.‘The Chancellor must consider a Stamp Duty Land Tax holiday for all buyers, not just first-timers,’ says Andrew Boast, CEO of Sam Conveyancing. ‘We saw exactly how this can instantly inject momentum during the pandemic.’Mr Boast says that when the initial 0 per cent rate on the first £500,000 was introduced between July 8, 2020, and March 31, 2021, transactions across England and Wales surged, resulting in 134,029 sales in March alone.‘When this full £500,000 allowance was extended to June 30, 2021, completions skyrocketed to an astonishing 169,769 in that final month, more than double the 72,998 sales recorded in, pre-pandemic June 2019,’ he says.‘But the moment standard thresholds returned on October 1, 2021, volumes immediately crashed to just 58,463.‘The data clearly proves that removing or reducing stamp duty allows buyers to allocate more capital towards their deposit.’Mr Boast adds: ‘A universal stamp duty holiday shifts the policy focus away from just first-time buyers and actively supports second-steppers.‘By incentivising existing homeowners to upsize, you free up affordable housing stock at the bottom of the ladder while generating vital transactional volume further up the chain.’You don’t need to be an economics expert to work out that a thriving property market is good for growth, not least because of all the associated spending on purchases such as furniture and other household items.But Burnham’s main focus since he seized power from Sir Keir Starmer has been his plan to oversee ‘the largest council house building programme since the post-war period’ – without giving any details about how this might be achieved.Meanwhile, the wider property market is left to fend for itself.‘The Government seems to have forgotten that the property market underpins the essential economy of this country,’ says Nigel Bishop of buying agent Recoco Property Search.‘But the only thing it has achieved is absolute uncertainty amongst buyers.’In 1995, Gordon Brown talked about helping ‘hard-working families’. Fifteen years later Ed Miliband came up with the ‘squeezed middle’, who also needed help. And in 2016, Theresa May introduced the idea of ‘the just about managing’.All three groups are still struggling despite the fact that, when it comes to property, the Government has the keys to unlock this fundamental pillar of growth.But despite the changes at the top there remains a depressing, albeit predictable, reluctance to use them. HOW YOU CAN CLINCH A SALE Price correctly: A realistic asking price generates a buzz, and having more than one interested buyer can lead to a bidding war.Research local market: Find out what other properties your buyers will be seeing and how much they are selling for. Ask yourself honestly: how does yours compare? Stage your home: Repaint it in neutral colours and put clutter and personal items in storage to give the illusion of more space. Change your agent: Don’t be tied into a long contract so you can switch if they aren’t working hard enough. Pay a bonus: Some sellers offer a cash ‘tip’ to incentivise agents to sell their home. Don’t panic: If your home is sensibly priced and in a good location, the right buyer will eventually come along.