Why isn't my house selling?

A house that will not sell is almost always telling you one of three things: the price is wrong for what that type of house actually achieves in that part of the city, the condition or the construction has frightened a buyer's lender, or the listing is reaching the wrong people. Each has a different fix, and only one of them is the price.

It takes under a minute — postcode, property type, bedrooms, honest condition — and a figure appears on screen before anyone contacts you. We pay close to market value rather than the full asking price — up to 95% of market value — with no fees to us at any point and up to £400 paid towards your legal fees. From acceptance, completion can follow in as little as a month, and once you accept our confirmed offer we do not pull out.

How long is too long on the market in Stoke-on-Trent?

There is no official local clock, and be careful with anyone who quotes you one. Public sale records show what a house sold for and the day it completed — not how long it sat on the market first. The benchmark worth having is a different one: the local market is still moving, even if yours has stopped.

Here is the size of it, from the Land Registry's own record of completed sales. Across the six Stoke-on-Trent postal districts — ST1 to ST6 — 3,175 houses changed hands in ordinary market sales in the twelve months to 28 May 2026. That is around sixty completions a week, week in and week out, in your city. Whatever is happening to your sale, a stalled local market is not it.

So the honest way to read time on the market is not against an average. It is against what each stage was supposed to tell you:

• The first two or three weeks are the test of the listing, not of the house. A new listing gets its biggest burst of attention in that window. If almost nobody asked to view in it, very few people saw the house in a way that made them want to.
• After that, viewing requests are the number to watch. A steady trickle means the listing is doing its job and the decision is happening at the house.
• Offers that keep falling over are a third thing again, and usually have nothing to do with how the house shows.

Six to eight weeks with no viewings at all is the point at which most people should stop waiting and change something, because waiting is the one response that cannot work. A house does not become more appealing by being available for longer — if anything, buyers who have watched it sit start to assume there is a reason.

Is it the price, the condition, or the house type?

Start with price, because it is the only one of the three you can change this week. Test it against what your type of house actually completes at in your own district — not against what neighbouring houses were asking. If the price is genuinely right and the house still will not move, the answer is usually the condition, or a construction type that a buyer's lender will not lend against.

The price test is worth doing properly, because "the area" is far too broad a unit. These are the medians from the same Land Registry record — completed sales, standard market transactions, the twelve months to 28 May 2026:

And the same figure varies a great deal by district, which is why an "average Stoke house price" is close to useless for a specific sale:

A terraced house in ST6 and a terraced house in ST5 are the same words and a £30,000 difference. If your asking price sits well above the median for your type in your district, that is the first thing to test — and the cheapest.

If the price checks out, look at the two things a buyer cannot get a mortgage past.

Condition. Lenders do not lend on houses their surveyor flags as needing immediate structural work. Damp with an obvious cause, a roof at the end of its life, cracking that has not been explained, an unsafe electrical installation, no working kitchen or bathroom — any of these can turn an agreed sale into a withdrawn mortgage offer weeks later. Buyers who could pay cash for the repairs are a small fraction of the market, and they know it, so they bid accordingly.

The construction itself. Stoke-on-Trent has a lot of housing stock that is perfectly sound to live in and very difficult to mortgage. Red ash floors — the industrial ash used as hardcore under solid floors across the Potteries — are the best known locally, and a house with them can go through several buyers before anyone works out why the sales keep collapsing. Concrete-built houses, BISF steel-framed houses and Airey houses are in the same position: most high-street lenders either decline them outright or require a structural engineer's report first. None of this makes the house unsellable. It does mean the pool of buyers who can actually complete is far smaller than the number who will come and look, and a listing priced for the general market will sit.

The reason this matters more than it sounds: none of these show up as "no interest". They show up as interest that keeps evaporating, which is the most confusing pattern to be on the receiving end of.

What do viewings-but-no-offers mean?

Viewings with no offers is the most informative outcome you can get, because it splits the problem cleanly. It means the listing is working and something at the house is not. People were interested enough to arrange a visit and to turn up, and then something they saw in person stopped them. A pure price problem usually looks different — it produces no viewings at all.

What that something is tends to be one of a short list.

Most often it is the gap between the photographs and the room. Wide-angle photographs of a small room are not dishonest, but they set an expectation the room then has to meet, and a buyer who has driven across the city feels that gap immediately. The same applies to anything the photographs could not carry: a busy road, a steep garden, an awkward layout you stopped noticing years ago.

Second is smell and damp, which are the two things no listing can convey and no viewer forgets. Both are frequently cheaper to deal with than people assume, and both are worth sorting before another round of viewings rather than after.

Third is the arithmetic the buyer does on the way home. If the house needs £20,000 spending and the asking price assumes it does not, they cannot simply offer £20,000 less — they would also have to find that money on top of a deposit, and their lender may hold back part of the advance until the work is done. That is why sound houses in need of work often attract viewings and silence.

And fourth, occasionally, is that the house is being shown to the wrong buyers — a three-bedroom family house being marketed at first-time buyers priced out of the third bedroom, or a house whose real market is an investor and is not being put in front of any.

The useful thing about this list is that a viewing you attend, or a viewing your agent gives you honest feedback on, will normally tell you which one it is within two or three visits. It is worth asking for that feedback in detail rather than as a summary.

What are my options if it still won't sell?

There are four, in roughly the order most people should try them: reduce the asking price, re-list with fresh photographs, go to auction, or sell directly to a cash buyer. The first costs you nothing but the difference, the second costs time, the third costs a fee and control over the final price, and the fourth costs some of the value in exchange for certainty.

Reduce the price. The obvious one, and for a house that has had few viewings it is usually the right one. Make it a real reduction — a cut small enough that the house stays in the same search bracket achieves very little, because most buyers are searching in round numbers.

Re-list, properly. A listing that has been up for months is stale, and a genuine refresh means new photographs in better light, a rewritten description that leads with the best thing about the house, and often a different agent — not because the first one did badly, but because agents differ in which buyers they reach and a different book can be the whole difference. If the house is mortgageable, you are not in a hurry and you have the appetite for another round, this is the option that will usually get you the most money, and we would say so. We are not the right answer for every seller and it is not in our interest to pretend otherwise.

Auction. Genuinely useful for houses the mortgage market struggles with, because auction buyers are frequently cash buyers and the sale is binding on the fall of the hammer. Go in knowing the trade: you pay fees, you set a reserve and then lose control of the number above it, and the result on the day depends on who happens to be in the room.

Sell directly. We buy with our own funds, so there is no chain, no mortgage to be approved and no survey that can be used to renegotiate. We pay close to market value rather than the full asking price — up to 95% of market value — and that difference is what buys the speed and the certainty. The figure on screen is an indication; the final price is agreed at the visit, where you are free to walk away. There are no fees to us at any stage, up to £400 of your legal fees are paid, completion can follow in as little as a month from acceptance, and once you accept our confirmed offer we do not pull out.

That last point is the one that matters most to someone whose sale has already collapsed once. A direct sale removes the two things that break agreed sales — a lender saying no, and a chain failing somewhere you cannot see.

Related

• Get my offer — see your figure before anyone contacts you.