Most people who are thinking about selling have been thinking about it for a while.
Not days. Months. Sometimes years. There’s a version of the conversation they keep having with themselves, usually late on a Sunday evening, or when the upstairs bathroom needs attention again, and then something stops them from picking up the phone, and life carries on.
This piece is about those reasons. Not to dismiss them, because some of them are legitimate. But to look at them properly, because a lot of people are sitting on a decision that, when they finally make it, they wish they’d made sooner.
We’ve been selling property in Southampton since 2005. The reasons people give for waiting haven’t changed much. Here are the ones we hear most often, and what we’d actually say back.
“The market isn’t right at the moment”
This one is probably the most common. And it’s worth examining, because it sounds reasonable on the surface.
Here’s the honest picture. Southampton’s average sold price sits at around £234,000 as of early 2026, with the wider postcode area averaging closer to £293,000. Those figures are slightly below where they were a year ago. If you’re waiting for prices to go back up before you sell, that’s a gamble, and it’s a gamble with a cost attached to it, because you’re staying somewhere you want to leave while you wait.
What most people don’t factor in is that the property they’re planning to buy has also softened. If everything moves in the same direction, you’re not gaining anything by waiting. The gap between what you sell for and what you buy for is often more important than the absolute number.
What’s true right now: there are active buyers in Southampton. Transaction volumes rose in 2025, 2,861 sales completed, up 7.7% on the year before. The market isn’t booming, but it’s moving. Well-priced properties are finding buyers. The ones that aren’t moving tend to be the ones that were priced on hope rather than evidence.
The market being “not right” usually means “not perfect.” It rarely means “genuinely wrong.”
“We’d need to find somewhere first”
This is the chicken-and-egg problem of selling, and it’s a real one. The fear is: we sell, can’t find anything we like, and end up in rented accommodation or pressured into buying something that isn’t right.
That fear is understandable, but the logic tends to run the wrong way round.
Buyers with a property to sell, who haven’t sold yet, are in a relatively weak negotiating position. If you find the house you want, another buyer with nothing to sell will almost always be preferred. That’s the part people don’t think about when they decide to look first and sell later.
Getting a valuation and going to market first doesn’t mean you have to accept an offer immediately. It means you know what you can achieve, you know your position, and when the right property comes up, you can move on it. Sellers take seriously-positioned buyers seriously.
The Southampton market in 2026 has reasonable stock. The view that there’s nothing to buy has eased from where it was two or three years ago. The search is a real conversation to have, but it shouldn’t be the reason to stay put.
“We’re thinking about doing the kitchen / loft / extension first”
We hear this a lot, and it’s the one that requires the most careful conversation.
There are improvements that genuinely add value, well-maintained, well-presented homes sell faster and at the top of the comparable range. There are improvements that you’ll spend money on and see very little return on. And there are improvements that you’re planning to make for the benefit of the next owners, without really admitting that to yourself.
The kitchen example is worth dwelling on. A full kitchen refurbishment in a Southampton house costs roughly £8,000 to £20,000 depending on specification. The value it adds to a sale is often between zero and 60% of that spend, and it depends entirely on whether the kitchen you’re replacing was actually putting buyers off. A dated but functional kitchen in a three-bedroom terrace rarely costs you a sale. A kitchen that’s clearly broken or unfit does.
What we’d say: talk to us before you spend the money. We can tell you honestly what the current kitchen costs you in the market and what a replacement would realistically recover. Sometimes the answer is that yes, a quick refresh is worth it. More often than not, a clean, decluttered, well-photographed version of what you already have is all that’s needed.
Doing significant work before selling also adds time. The people who spend six months doing up a property before listing it have often waited through the part of the year when buyer activity is highest.
“We’re worried about interest rates, buyers can’t afford to pay what we need”
Interest rates are higher than they were in 2021 and 2022. That’s a fact, and it has affected affordability for some buyers. But a few things are worth putting alongside that.
First, buyer demand is not as suppressed as people expect. First-time buyer activity in Southampton continues, with an average purchase price of around £209,000, accessible enough that the step onto the ladder remains achievable for people who have saved a reasonable deposit and earn a household income in line with the city’s norms.
Second, the buyers who are active in 2026 are buyers who have made their peace with current rates. They’re not waiting for rates to fall to 2%. They’ve worked their finances around the reality of the market, and they’re looking. The window-shoppers have mostly drifted off. The people browsing Rightmove in 2026 are generally people who intend to buy.
Third, and this is the part that gets overlooked, interest rates affect your next mortgage too. If you’re moving from a two-bedroom flat to a three-bedroom house because your family has grown, waiting for rates to drop means your buyer pool waits too, but so do you. You’re all in the same market.
“We don’t know where we’d go”
This is probably the most honest reason, and it deserves the most honest response.
There are people who have genuinely outgrown their home, who want to move, but who don’t have a clear destination in mind. And selling without a destination is a scary prospect. That’s real, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise.
What we’d say is: the destination question and the selling question are connected but they’re not the same question. You can have a conversation about value, timing, and what’s realistic in the market without committing to anything. A valuation is not a contract. It’s information.
And sometimes the destination question gets clearer once people understand what their budget actually is. People come to us convinced they can’t afford somewhere with a garden, or a fourth bedroom, or a catchment they want to be in, and the numbers turn out to be different to what they’d assumed. Equally, sometimes people realise the move they’re imagining is going to stretch them beyond what’s comfortable, and that’s useful to know before you’ve accepted an offer and started the search.
We have conversations like this regularly, and most people find them useful regardless of what they decide. The conversation costs nothing.
A note on timing
There’s a timing window every year when buyer activity is highest in Southampton. Spring is consistently when properties attract the most interest, and that window doesn’t stay open indefinitely. The school summer holidays reliably slow things down, and sellers who get their property on the market in May are still well-placed. Sellers who tell themselves they’ll get round to it in September have lost six months.
It doesn’t mean you should rush into something you’re not ready for. But if you’ve been thinking about this for a while, the difference between acting now and waiting until autumn is more significant than most people realise, and not just because of the season.
If any of this sounds familiar
We’re an independent team of eight people, based in Bedford Place, Southampton. Jonathan Clegg has owned and managed property in this city since 2002. When someone asks us whether they should sell, whether now is the right time, or what their house would actually achieve in this market, we give them an honest answer, not one designed to get them on the books.
If something in this piece resonated, it’s probably worth a conversation.
Hunters Southampton | 02380 987720 | southampton@hunters.com | hunters.com/southampton
