How long do Londoners actually stay in their homes?

Most London buyers start with the same thought: five years minimum, maybe longer, possibly forever. Then life gets involved. A job changes, a relationship changes, the flat starts feeling smaller, and suddenly the For Sale board is back outside.

So how long do Londoners really stay before selling? I pulled every repeat sale on the same property from HM Land Registry, which records sales from 1995 onwards, and calculated the gap between sales for every borough and ward in London.

The headline: the typical London home that resells does so after 6.51 years. The interesting part is how much that changes by area. In the fastest regeneration pockets, the median resale comes in under four years. In a few outer suburbs, it is closer to nine.

How I measured it

HM Land Registry records property sales in England and Wales going back to 1995. Each property was mapped to identifier, so when the same home sells more than once I can line up the transactions and measure the gaps.

For each London property with at least two sales, I calculated the gap in years between each pair of consecutive sales. I then averaged those gaps per property and took the median across all properties in each borough or neighbourhood. The London-wide median came out at 6.51 years, which is the benchmark used throughout the charts.

Two things to keep in mind. Inheritance, divorce transfers, and corporate restructures all show up as “sales” in the data. And new builds will look fast on this metric just because they haven’t had a chance to be held for long.

The shape of the distribution

Distribution of years between consecutive sales (London, all repeat‑sale properties)

The biggest single-year bins sit between 2 and 7 years, with a peak at year 4 (9.04% of repeat sales). About 3.82% of properties resell inside a year of the previous sale - the house-flipper and off-plan-investor tail. From year five onwards the share falls steadily, and only about 6% of repeat-sale properties show holds of 20+ years.

Remove those sub-1-year flips and the London median nudges from 6.51 → 6.84 years. That 0.33-year shift is useful context: flipping exists, but it is not large enough to explain the city-wide pattern. Most repeat-sale homes really do sit around the six-and-a-half-year mark.

Boroughs

Across the 32 boroughs plus the City of London, the medians sit in a fairly narrow band: 5.73 years in Newham at one end, 7.48 in Havering at the other. A 1.75-year spread sounds modest, but the geography is not random.

London borough turnover vs the London median (6.51 years)

The faster-moving boroughs are mostly inner London, regeneration London, or flat-heavy markets:

• Newham: 5.73 years (−12.0% vs London). Stratford, Olympic Park, Canning Town: a borough reshaped by regeneration sites and investor-heavy new builds.
• Westminster: 5.91 years (−9.2%). Pied-à-terre territory, with a lot of small flats and a lot of buy-to-sell behaviour.
• Brent: 6.11 years (−6.1%). Wembley Park and the inner north-west flat market pull the borough faster than the London median.
• Tower Hamlets: 6.16 years (−5.4%). Docklands, Aldgate fringe, and a lot of leasehold flats.
• Lambeth (6.19), Kensington and Chelsea (6.20), Wandsworth (6.20) and Haringey (6.20) round out the fast end.

The slow end is almost entirely outer London:

• Havering: 7.48 years (+14.9%). Outer east London: larger homes, established families, and fewer reasons to move quickly.
• Bexley: 7.00 years (+7.5%).
• Bromley: 6.92 years (+6.2%).
• Barking and Dagenham: 6.91 years (+6.1%).
• Hillingdon and Harrow: 6.89 years (+5.8%).

The pattern is clear enough: inner London and the regeneration belt turn over faster; outer suburbs hold on for longer. It is roughly the commute-time map turned inside out.

Full borough table

Zooming in neighbourhoods

The borough-level spread is narrow. At neighbourhood level, it opens up. The fastest neighbourhoods in London turn over in under four years, the slowest are close to nine.

The 20 Fastest

Top 20 fastest‑turnover neighbourhoods vs the London median

• Nine Elms (Wandsworth): 3.63 years (−44.2% vs London). Battersea Power Station and the riverside towers still sit at the sharp end. Many of those flats were bought off-plan by investors, so what appears as a second sale can sometimes be the first owner-occupier finally buying in.
• Aldgate (City of London): 4.58 years (−29.6%). Treat this one with caution because the sample is small, but it fits the City-fringe flat market.
• Green Street West (Newham): 4.67 years, Little Ilford (Newham): 4.74 years and Stratford Olympic Park (Newham): 4.74 years. Newham still dominates the fast-turnover list.
• Ilford Town (Redbridge): 4.87 years, Wall End (Newham): 4.94 years and Woodberry Down (Hackney): 4.98 years are all under five years.
• By the time you reach Wembley Park (Brent): 5.27 years, the area is still 19% faster than the London median.

Two City of London entries, Aldgate and Bishopsgate, have much smaller property counts than the big residential wards. They are still useful signals, but I would not over-interpret the exact decimal point.

The dominant pattern is new builds, regeneration sites, and flat-heavy central markets. Some of that is mechanical. Some of it is behavioural: off-plan buyers are more often investors than people settling in for the long haul.

The 20 Slowest

At the other end, people simply do not move as often. These are the corners of London where buyers put down roots and supply stays tight.

Bottom 20 slowest‑turnover neighbourhoods vs the London median

• Shirley South (Croydon): 8.78 years (+34.9%). The slowest neighbourhood in London: quiet semis, good schools, and families that stay.
• Marshalls & Rise Park (Havering): 8.55 years, Emerson Park (Havering): 8.22 years and Selsdon & Addington Village (Croydon): 8.20 years.
• West Wickham (Bromley), South Hornchurch (Havering), Sanderstead (Croydon), Cranham (Havering), Upminster (Havering): all outer London, with bigger gardens and longer journeys into Zone 1.

The geography is striking. The slowest 20 neighbourhoods are heavily concentrated in Havering and Croydon, with Bromley and Barking and Dagenham also showing up. If you want the part of London where people put down roots, start there.

One genuine oddball: Tower (City of London): 7.98 years. Central, expensive, and yet slow to trade. The sample is small, but it is a useful reminder that not every central flat market is churn-heavy.

Tenure, property type and new builds

The geography story is only half of it. The other half is the type of home. Splitting the same repeat-sale data by tenure, property type, and new-build status surfaces patterns the borough map hides.

Freehold vs leasehold

Median turnover by tenure vs the London median (6.51 years)

Leaseholds - overwhelmingly flats in London - change hands noticeably faster than freeholds. That fits the market: leasehold flats are smaller, more often a first rung on the ladder, and more often bought as investments. Freeholds skew towards houses people keep for longer.

By property type

Median turnover by property type vs the London median

Flats turn over fastest, detached houses turn over slowest. The ordering - Flat < Terraced < Semi-detached < Detached - is basically the size-and-life-stage ladder. The flat is the starter home, the detached house is the destination.

New builds vs existing stock

Median turnover for new builds vs existing stock

Homes whose first recorded sale was as a new build resell faster than the rest of the stock. Some of that is mechanical, but a lot of it is behavioural: off-plan buyers are disproportionately investors, and the first owner-occupier is often a second-cycle buyer already thinking about the next move.

Why this is actually useful if you’re buying

Turnover speed tells you something a listing won’t: what kind of owner base you’d be joining.

1. Fast turnover = investor / first‑time buyer territory. If the median resale in your prospective new-build cluster is under 5 years, you are probably looking at a place dominated by short-term holders. That changes the feel of a building or neighbourhood:

• Service charges can be harder to challenge when owners are transient (they don’t push back as hard at AGMs).
• Resale supply is constant, you are rarely the only flat for sale.
• Capital growth has to fight against a permanent overhang of sellers.

2. Slow turnover = limited supply, but stickier prices. A neighbourhood where the median home sells every 7+ years has naturally limited supply. When a good house comes up, it tends to attract a queue. These are the streets where “I had to offer £30k over asking just to be considered” stories come from.

3. The “right” turnover depends on what you want.

• Yield play, clean exit? Nine Elms, Newham, Wembley Park, the City fringe. Easier to enter and exit, but you are competing on a treadmill.
• House for the next couple of decades? Havering, Bromley, Bexley, outer Croydon. Harder to break into, but you will not be the only one staying.
• Middle ground? Boroughs sitting close to the city median: Greenwich, Ealing, Merton, Richmond, Kingston, Waltham Forest. Some churn, some stickiness.

One Useful Comparison

A typical repeat-sale home in Nine Elms changes hands about 2.4× as often as one in Shirley South: 3.63 years vs 8.78 years. Same city, completely different ownership culture.

Caveats

A few caveats before you take any of this too literally:

• This measures the gap between resales, not how long families actually live in a home. The two diverge whenever a property never resells within the window, which is a lot of homes.
• Newer neighbourhoods can’t show long holds by definition. A 2020 flat hasn’t had the chance to be held for eight years.
• Land Registry “sales” include things that aren’t really moves: transfers between spouses, inheritance, corporate restructures.

The absolute numbers will move a bit with stricter filtering, but the shape is stable. Newham is fastest, Havering is slowest, new-build and central flat markets turn over quickly, and the outer east and south are much stickier.

TL;DR

The typical London home that resells does so after 6.51 years. Newham is the fastest borough (5.73), Havering the slowest (7.48). At neighbourhood level, Nine Elms turns over every 3.63 years and Shirley South every 8.78. That is a 2.4× gap inside the same city.