UK Sellers Return in Force While London Price Expectations Sink to a Three-Year Low

RICS July 2026 survey: new vendor instructions leapt to -4 from -23, the national price balance eased to -30, and London's 12-month outlook fell to -23.

The sharpest move in the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors' July survey, published on 13 August, was not in prices but in supply. The net balance of surveyors reporting new vendor instructions jumped to -4 from -23 in June, a 19-point improvement and the most abrupt single move in the release. Supply is arriving into a demand picture that has not shifted at all.

Buyer enquiries stayed at -28 and agreed sales at -30, both unchanged on June. The headline house price balance eased slightly to -30 from -32, so surveyors seeing falls still outnumber those seeing rises by 30 percentage points.

A supply shock without a demand response

When instructions surge and enquiries do not, the arithmetic points one way. Surveyors put the three-month price outlook at -31, essentially unchanged, which suggests the profession expects the extra stock to be absorbed through price rather than through a pickup in transactions. The twelve-month view is the one bright spot: the national price balance for a year ahead is +4, though that is down from +8 in June, and sales expectations for the same horizon rose to their most positive reading since February.

London is where the sentiment has broken

The capital is now a separate market in this dataset. London's twelve-month price expectations balance fell to -23 from -10, the weakest reading since October 2023. Against a national figure of +4, that is a 27-point gap between how surveyors see London and how they see the rest of the country. RICS members attribute the divergence to the domestic political and fiscal climate and the cost of mortgage finance rather than to anything specific to London's housing stock — which, if correct, means the gap reflects who buys in London, not what is for sale there.

What the underlying numbers look like

Glopra's UK row, snapshotted on 23 July 2026, carries a national average of $3,850 per square metre and a gross rental yield of 7.35%. Our bubble risk score for the UK is 41 out of 100 — in the moderate band and among the lower readings across the developed European markets we track, well below Portugal at 84, Spain at 61 and the Netherlands at 65. A market with soft sentiment and a low valuation-stress score is a different proposition from one where both are stretched.

The standardised effective tax on a non-resident landlord's rental income in the UK is around 18.5% in our model, so the headline gross yield narrows considerably on an after-tax basis. Surveyor sentiment is a leading indicator of activity, not a price index; the RICS balances say what practitioners are seeing in their books this month, and this month they are seeing sellers, not buyers.

Sources: RICS UK Residential Market Survey https://www.rics.org/news-insights/market-surveys/uk-residential-market-survey; Reuters via The Star https://www.thestar.com.my/business/business-news/2026/08/14/london-house-price-sentiment-sours-further; Trading Economics https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/rics-house-price-balance

Market data: United Kingdom