UK House Price Balance Steadies at -28% in August, RICS Survey Finds
The RICS August 2026 survey shows a house price net balance of -28%, buyer enquiries at -19% and rent expectations at +44%, the sharpest signal in the release.
The RICS UK Residential Market Survey for August 2026, published on 10 September, reports a headline house price net balance of -28%, against -29% in July. More surveyors still see prices falling than rising, but the deterioration has stopped getting worse. The demand side improved more visibly: new buyer enquiries came in at -19%, the least negative reading since January, and agreed sales at -17%, the least negative since February.
"Sales market indicators continue to edge up from recent lows although interest rate uncertainty remains a significant headwind," said RICS chief economist Simon Rubinsohn.
Supply is the quiet number
New instructions registered a net balance of 0%, meaning as many surveyors reported more homes coming to market as reported fewer. Market appraisals, the earlier signal of what will be listed in the months ahead, sat at -17%. A market where buyer enquiries are recovering from a low base while the appraisal pipeline is shrinking is one where the stock overhang thins out on its own, without prices doing the work.
Expectations split by horizon. The three-month sales balance is -3%, effectively flat. The twelve-month price balance is +6%, modestly positive. That positive national figure is not shared everywhere: respondents projected negative twelve-month price paths for London, East Anglia, the South East, Yorkshire and the Humber, and the South West. On current prices, Northern Ireland was the only region reported as rising, with the North West sustaining gentle growth and London falling more steeply than the UK average, though improving.
Lettings is where the pressure sits
The rental indicators are far more emphatic than the sales ones. Tenant demand came in at +18% while landlord instructions fell to -14%, and the net balance for rent expectations over the coming three months reached +44%. Demand rising against a shrinking supply of rental instructions is the textbook set-up for rent growth, and surveyors are pricing exactly that.
What this does and does not tell you about prices
A net balance is not a price index. It records the share of surveyors reporting increases minus the share reporting decreases, so it captures direction and breadth, not magnitude. That distinction matters when reading it next to the hard data: our own United Kingdom snapshot, dated 7 September 2026, carries an annual price change of 2.0% drawn from the ONS and HM Land Registry UK House Price Index for June 2026. A -28% sentiment balance and a +2.0% measured annual change are not in conflict; they are different instruments looking at different reference periods.
The same snapshot puts the national average at $3,850 per square metre with a gross rental yield of 7.35% and a price-to-income ratio of 8.0. Our Bubble Risk score for the UK is 41, inside the moderate band. For a cross-border buyer the two lines that move the arithmetic most are round-trip transaction costs of about 9.8% and an effective tax of roughly 18.51% on non-resident rental income in our standardised case, which is the conservative reading without the personal allowance.
Sources: RICS UK Residential Market Survey, August 2026 https://www.rics.org/content/dam/ricsglobal/documents/market-surveys/August-2026-UK-Residential-Market-Survey.pdf
Market data: United Kingdom