Chaos for London's Housing Market Post-Brexit Vote

Is London’s great home price correction finally happening? The U.K. capital’s housing market has been notoriously unaffordable for years, but in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit referendum, there are some hints that things are about to change.

This week, the London media reported that thousands of home sales have fallen through within the past month. According to reports in The Standard, some real estate agencies are admitting that as many as two-thirds of the offers they were negotiating at the time of the June 23 referendum have since fallen through or been renegotiated, with central London prices falling 12 percent in just a month. Comments from Britain’s biggest rental and estate agent group, Countrywide, confirm that these London agents are not experiencing an erratic blip. In a new report sent to CityLab Thursday, Chief Executive Alison Platt said that from April onwards, Countrywide saw “a slowdown in [their] retail and London residential businesses and, since the E.U. referendum result this has become more marked in London, the South East and expensive prime markets. The rest of the country has fared somewhat better[.]”