Connells’ latest research reads, at first glance, like the sort of stat you’d chuck into a slow news day: only 5% of 2026 sellers had owned for under three years. Fine. People are settling down. Nothing to see.
Then you clock the slope, not the snapshot. That same number was 15% in 2006, 8% in 2016, and now it’s at an all-time low. The “under five years” cohort has collapsed from 29% to 14%. “Under ten” from 47% to 32%. The average seller has gone from 9.2 years of ownership a decade ago to 12.3 now. This isn’t a wobble; it’s a structural throttling of turnover.
Connells does the industry a favour by pinning a transaction number on it: if people moved at 2006 frequency, we’d have roughly 439,000 more transactions a year. Against a market running at about 1.14m, that’s not a trimming round the edges. That’s a missing third of the entire market.
Aneisha Beveridge sums it up neatly: “moving no longer pays”. That phrasing matters. For decades, the British housing market let homeowners pretend moving was a lifestyle choice while quietly behaving like an investment strategy. Trade up, the market lifts you, the gain covers the stamp duty, fees and upheaval. That machine has stopped, particularly where it mattered most: London. When 21% of homes in the capital are worth less than owners paid (and 32% of £1m+ purchases), the “we’ll make it back on the next move” logic dies on the spot.
And once the cushion goes, the costs stop hiding.
Stamp duty is the obvious villain. We’ve somehow normalised a tax whose main behavioural effect is to keep people in the wrong homes. The long-run evidence is plain: push transaction taxes up and mobility falls sharply, especially the “right-sizing” moves that lubricate chains. The 2025 threshold reversion was an instant extra few grand for plenty of movers, and the Treasury can point to its £15bn haul, but the market can point to the missing transactions.
Rates are the second lock on the door. Millions are still sat on sub‑3% money. Every moving decision now includes a brutal comparison: keep the cheap mortgage and tolerate the house or move and reset to 4-5% plus stamp duty. Most rational households stay.
The third factor is the quiet killer: price growth. When wages are doing the heavy lifting and prices aren’t bailing you out, the “move and recover it in appreciation” story vanishes. Connells’ loss-making seller stats are the clearest proof: the market is now asking some movers to pay for the privilege of moving.
For estate agents, this is not an economic curiosity. It’s your pipeline.
The industry was built for a customer who came back every nine years. Increasingly, they come back every twelve - and plenty of them won’t come back at all if they’ve executed the modern Triple Jump: skipping the flat and stretching straight to the biggest house they can fund, because they suspect they’ll only get one more roll of the dice.
Meanwhile, the supply chain is being priced as if churn still exists. Portals ratchet ARPA regardless. Fixed branch costs don’t care that the market’s constipated. And that’s why the strategic pivots you’re seeing aren’t “diversification”; they’re adaptation to scarcity: franchising, consolidation, and the desperate hunt for recurring revenue through lettings, mortgages, protection and managed services.
There’s a hard lesson in Connells’ numbers: speeding up the process helps, but it won’t restart churn. If moving still triggers a five‑figure tax hit in parts of the country and a mortgage rate reset, households will sit tight.
So the question for every agency and supplier isn’t whether churn returns. It’s whether you’ve built a business that can thrive in the long gap between moves - and whether, when your customer finally does reappear in twelve years’ time, they’ll even remember you without having to see you on a portal you’re renting by the month.