Around 1m UK homes have lost all their pandemic price gains, Zoopla estimates

Around one million homes across the UK have now had all the gains in value made during the coronavirus pandemic wiped out in recent months, according to calculations by a property website.

Using its own valuation estimates, Zoopla looked at increases in property values since February 2022 and compared this with how prices have performed in the past six months, as the market has weakened.

It estimates that around 1,046,000 properties have lost all of the gains in value that they had previously made during the pandemic.

By contrast, nearly 20.6 million homes are estimated by Zoopla to have not lost any of their pandemic gains in recent months.

Some properties have also lost some, but not all of their pandemic gains.

Zoopla said weaker market conditions led to housing values starting to fall back in the second half of 2022.

Despite the UK’s housing market seeing a tumultuous end to the year in 2022, the vast majority (92%) of homes increased in value across the year as a whole, with an average gain of £19,000, the website calculated.

Some 2.3 million homes registered a fall in value across 2022, according to Zoopla’s figures, with an average loss of £7,300.

Zoopla estimates that 15.8 million homes fell in value in the last three months of 2022, while 13.9 million made gains.

Richard Donnell, executive director at Zoopla, said house price gains made earlier on in the pandemic “have started to be eroded in the final half of 2022 as buyer demand weakened in the face of higher mortgage rates and weaker growth in household incomes”.