Featured property – Kamnal Park, Haslemere – Impressive Five bedroomed family home in a much sought after location.
Clarke Gammon – Estate Agents in Guildford, Haslemere & Liphook
Autumn brings a welcome change of pace
There is something quite reassuring about September in the property market.
The summer holidays finish, schools go back, diaries become a little more orderly and people who have spent July and August saying, “we’ll think about it in September” start thinking about it properly.
This year, that return to normality feels more noticeable than usual.
After three consecutive months of falling asking prices, the latest Rightmove House Price Index shows the average price of a newly listed home rising by 0.7% in September to £367,440. That is slightly stronger than the typical September increase and the first monthly rise since May.
I would not describe that as a dramatic turnaround, nor would it be sensible to do so. Average asking prices remain below where they were a year ago, mortgage affordability is still challenging and buyers have a great deal of choice.
But there is a difference between a difficult market and a market that is beginning to settle. At the moment, I think we are seeing more of the latter.
Buyers appear to be re-engaging
Rightmove describes September’s figures as an early indication of the traditional autumn bounce. That chimes with another useful piece of evidence from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.
Its August survey showed new buyer enquiries improving for the fifth consecutive month, while agreed sales also moved away from the lows seen earlier in the year. Surveyors’ expectations for sales over the next three months have moved much closer to neutral, with sentiment over the following twelve months becoming modestly positive.
None of that suggests a sudden return to the frantic markets of previous years. Frankly, I am not sure many people would want that anyway.
What it does suggest is that buyers have adjusted.
They have adjusted to mortgage rates being higher than they were several years ago. They have adjusted to a world that seems capable of producing a new headline every morning. And they have adjusted their expectations about what they can comfortably afford.
Once people have done that arithmetic, life tends to carry on.
A growing family still needs another bedroom. A commute that has become tiresome still encourages a move. Children still start school. People retire, change jobs and decide they would rather have countryside outside the back door.
Those fundamentals matter enormously in our local markets.
Guildford remains a collection of markets, not one average
Guildford is often talked about as though it were a single housing market. Anyone who works here knows it is nothing of the sort.
A family house in Burpham or Merrow attracts a different audience from a period home in Charlotteville. Onslow Village has its own following, as does St Catherine’s, while homes within easy reach of the station have another set of considerations entirely.
What ties them together is that buyers are currently quite discerning.
The latest ONS figures put the average Guildford house price at approximately £533,000 in July. That was 2.2% below a year earlier. Interestingly, average private rents have moved firmly in the opposite direction, reaching around £1,736 per month in August, 5.6% higher than a year before.
I would not read too much into any single month’s local house-price figure — the ONS itself cautions that local authority data can move around because transaction numbers are smaller — but the broader message is useful.
Guildford has seen some price adjustment, while the cost of renting has continued to increase. That creates quite an interesting environment for buyers who are thinking beyond the next twelve months rather than trying to pick the perfect week to enter the market.
Haslemere still sells on something statistics struggle to measure
Haslemere is a good example of why national property statistics should always be treated as context rather than valuation advice.
The latest ONS figure for Waverley puts the average property price at around £553,000, 2.6% lower than a year ago.
Useful information, certainly. But it tells you remarkably little about the difference between a house near the station, a family home in Shottermill, a property overlooking countryside towards Blackdown or a village home in Grayswood.
Those differences matter.
People choose Haslemere because of its station, schools and High Street, certainly, but also because of the Surrey Hills, walks from the doorstep, the independent shops and that difficult-to-quantify sense that it still feels like a proper town with countryside wrapped around it.
Those attractions have not changed because mortgage rates moved half a percentage point.
Buyers are simply expecting the price to make sense.
And I think that is a very fair expectation.
Liphook continues to offer a compelling alternative
Liphook has another dynamic altogether.
The latest ONS figure for East Hampshire shows an average value of around £441,000, only 1.2% below a year earlier, while first-time buyer prices were essentially unchanged year-on-year.
For buyers looking across the Surrey/Hampshire border, Liphook can make a compelling case for itself.
There is the station, A3 access, good schooling, countryside and, importantly, the ability to buy rather more house for a budget than in some neighbouring Surrey locations.
We regularly meet buyers who begin their search with quite rigid geographical boundaries and then gradually widen the map once they understand what different areas offer.
Liphook often benefits from that conversation.
More competition means the launch matters
There is one figure in Rightmove’s September report that sellers should pay particular attention to.
The number of homes available for sale is now at a twelve-year high for this time of year.
That means the autumn market has buyers, but it also has competition.
Rightmove says 74% of homes that have sold this year were priced correctly enough at the outset that they did not subsequently need an asking-price reduction.
I think that tells us more about today’s market than almost any national price index.
The best strategy is no longer to add five or ten per cent “to leave room for negotiation” and hope somebody falls in love with the house. Buyers see everything online. They receive alerts the moment competing homes appear. They know what has been reduced and how long something has been advertised.
A credible price creates confidence.
It is worth remembering, too, that a realistic price does not mean accepting less than a property is worth. Quite often it means generating more viewings at the beginning of the campaign, when interest is greatest, rather than spending several months working backwards towards the figure the market would have accepted in the first place.
The mortgage market is the awkward part of the picture
There is no point pretending that everything is moving in the right direction.
Rightmove’s mortgage tracker puts the average two-year fixed rate at 5.29%, up from 5.09% last month. For some households that is meaningful money every month.
However, there remains a broad range of mortgage products and lenders are actively competing for business. The challenge is primarily affordability rather than a lack of available finance.
That distinction matters.
People are still able to borrow; they simply need to be more thoughtful about how much they borrow.
In some respects, that produces healthier decisions.
And for those moving up, the arithmetic can be surprisingly helpful
I made this point last month and it remains worth repeating.
If values have adjusted slightly, sellers who are also buying should look at the whole move rather than only the price of their existing property.
Someone selling at £600,000 and buying at £900,000 can actually benefit from a percentage adjustment across the market because the saving on the more expensive purchase may exceed the adjustment on the sale.
For upsizers, a flatter market can therefore be a very good time to move.
It is one of those slightly counter-intuitive truths about property that tends to get lost whenever the newspapers talk about prices being “up” or “down”.
Looking towards the final part of 2026
I have worked through enough different property cycles not to get too excited by one positive monthly number, just as I would not become despondent because of one negative one.
Markets rarely turn with a fanfare.
Usually, people simply begin enquiring a little more often. Viewings become easier to arrange. A few more offers are made. Chains begin to form. Confidence returns almost imperceptibly.
There are signs of that happening now.
Guildford, Haslemere and Liphook remain fundamentally attractive places to live, each for rather different reasons. There are buyers in the market and there are good homes available to them.
Sellers still need realism. Buyers still need to understand their finances. And everyone benefits from taking advice based on what is happening in their particular road and price range rather than relying on a national headline.
But after a rather unusual summer, September feels more purposeful.
And sometimes, in property, a little more purpose is all a market needs.
Please feel free to contact any of our offices for an informal chat or to book a market appraisal. Why not try our instant online valuation tool to get started?
Steve Cook FNAEA Senior Consultant – Clarke Gammon
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