Manchester mixed-use listings: is 106 days misleading?

[LightJournal]

Agents are giving me different explanations, including seasonality, so I’m trying to separate signal from noise. My Manchester sample of mixed-use buildings between £661,400 and £992,200, centred around £826,800, is taking roughly 106 days to find a buyer. Vacancy seems common among the longest-running listings.

Do recent completed sales support that picture, or are active listings distorting it by excluding withdrawn stock?

 

[bakesAndView]

Active listings alone will probably make the market look slower and more expensive than it is, because the correctly priced properties disappear from that sample while stale ones remain. I’d compare recent completions with withdrawals and note when each seller first cut the price. Also keep the neighbourhood boundaries tight; “Manchester” can combine very different mixed-use locations.

 

[travelsAndGrove]

How are you defining “find a buyer” — listing to offer accepted, or listing to completion? Buyer financing could make the second measure much longer, particularly where the residential and commercial elements complicate the purchase. I’d also separate vacant buildings from income-producing ones rather than treating vacancy only as an explanation for outliers.

 

[travelsAndGrove]

One caveat to Luca’s point: withdrawals are not automatically failed sales. Some may return later, change agent or reflect a seller who was never strongly motivated.

I’d build a simple property-by-property table: first listing date, condition, occupancy, original and final asking price, first price-cut date, status, and neighbourhood. Then compare the completed, still-listed and withdrawn groups separately. With this range, the 106-day figure is useful descriptively, but not yet enough to call a monthly market change.