Why Is My Flat Getting Viewings But No Offers? (A Real Consultation)

Few things about selling a home are more confusing than viewings that keep coming while offers never do. The photos are clearly working, people keep booking in, and then... nothing.

I've now done more than 800 free consultations with UK home sellers, and this call captured that exact situation. A couple with a garden flat in east London had booked travel for November, and with a month or so on the market and no offers, they were starting to wonder if they should switch to something faster. (I've changed some details to protect their privacy.)

A flat that's getting steady viewings but no offers often just needs more time, because sellers typically see around one offer for every seven viewings. The right response is rarely auction or a "cash buy" company; it's preparing the legal side early, then reviewing the price and agent once the numbers say so.

But the reasoning matters more than the conclusion, so let me walk you through the call.

If your own sale has gone quiet and you want to cut right to the chase, I've designed a free quiz for exactly that. It asks about your home and your priorities, then points you at the best way to sell it, and it takes about 60 seconds.

Hit the button below to get started:

The situation: a garden flat, a deadline, and no offers

Daniel (not his real name) and his partner weren't in trouble. They just wanted to know whether they were on the right track, because the clock was ticking.

Here's where they were:

• A three bed ground floor garden flat in east London.
  A newer build with its own private garden and a long lease.
• Bought new in summer 2022 for around £925,000.
  That number mattered to them. Selling below it felt like losing.
• A month or so on the market.
  They launched at around £1 million and cut the price back below it after the first few weeks.
• A dozen viewings, no offers.
  A steady two or three a week, including a couple of second viewings, with more booked in.
• A deadline with a twist.
  They'd booked travel for early November. They didn't need the sale money in order to go; they just didn't want the sale hanging over them while they were away.
• One issue being fixed.
  A noise issue from some of the building's shared machinery. The management company had issued a section 20 notice (the formal process for major works), but it wasn't resolved yet.

Their valuations had covered a strangely wide range, with the most consistent figure sitting around the £1 million mark. And their agent had floated one idea already: relist at "offers over £900,000" and let competition push the price up.

So Daniel's real question wasn't "why isn't it selling?"...

It was "should we switch to something faster, or something more aggressive, before the deadline arrives?"

Let's take the faster routes first, because they're the ones a deadline always drags onto the table.

Would a "we buy any house" company get it sold by November?

A genuine "we buy any house" company can complete well before a three month deadline, but they pay around 80% of market value. On a flat at this price level, that means giving up the best part of £200,000, and the trade only makes sense when speed is worth more to you than money. These sellers had time.

I ran my own house-buying company for years and competed against nearly all the major players, so I know exactly what that speed costs from the inside. Their model is a conveyor belt: buy below market value, resell quickly, repeat. The discount is the price of the certainty.

For a seller who absolutely needs to exchange in three weeks, that can genuinely be the right deal. But Daniel had three months, was getting viewings every week, and had no financial need to sell at all. Paying £200,000 for speed he didn't need would have been an expensive and unnecessary shortcut.

One warning while we're here, because it catches a lot of people out: some "we buy any house" companies claim to pay 90 to 95% of market value. But behind that claim sits one of two things: 

1. Either it's a high offer that quietly drops late in the day, once you're committed...
2. Or they're not really buying at all, and behind the scenes they simply go looking for a buyer, the same as an agent would.

I've written a full guide to house-buying companies if you want the whole picture on how they operate.

So that route came off the list in minutes. The next one sounds more respectable, but it hides a similar trade...

Should you auction a flat that isn't getting offers?

Auction earns its place when a property can't get a mortgage, or when it's really a development project, because investors are the realistic buyers either way. A beautifully finished, fully mortgageable garden flat is the opposite of that, so auction mostly shrinks the pool of people allowed to bid on it.

Sellers typically achieve 10 to 15% less at auction than they'd get through a well-run estate agent sale, which on this flat meant £100,000 to £150,000.

And you give up that much at auction for two reasons:

1. Most buyers either can't or won't buy at auction, so there's less competition, and
2. The buyers who do go through the hassle of auction are there hunting for a bargain.

So for me, the deciding factor is mortgageability: If no lender would touch a property, auction can be exactly the right route. But this flat was mortgageable, liveable and ready to move into, so the normal market was still its best market.

There's a fit problem on top as well though.

At this price level, the rental sums don't stack up for investors, and there was nothing to renovate, extend or convert. So there'd have been a real chance the flat simply didn't sell on auction day. And an unsold auction follows a property around, because buyers can see the failed attempt in the online listing history and start asking what's wrong with it.

I've compared the two routes properly in selling a house by auction vs estate agent if you want the full breakdown.

With both fast routes off the table, we could finally deal with the question hiding underneath the deadline...

How many viewings before you should worry?

Sellers typically get around one offer for every seven viewings, so a dozen viewings with no offer isn't that unusual. Once a property reaches 20 to 25 viewings with no offer, the numbers themselves become the signal that something needs to change (usually the price).

I've been selling properties through estate agents for fifteen years, several hundred for clients and more than a hundred of my own.

When a property isn't selling, I've only ever seen five reasons: a bad market, a bad match, bad photographs, a bad agent, or a bad price.

But before I apply that checklist, there's a question I always ask first: is anything actually wrong yet?

In a healthy market in a built-up area, I typically expect to see a couple of viewings a week, every week. When we get that, we tend to end up selling somewhere around our asking price. Daniel was a month or so in with a dozen viewings, second viewings among them, and more booked. Those are genuinely good numbers.

No offers from a dozen viewings is like flipping a coin and getting heads twice. It might feel significant, but it isn't. At 20 or 25 viewings with nothing, I start looking hard at other factors. But he wasn't there yet, and the local market backed that up...

The market check that settled it

On the call, we looked at his competition together: similar three bed properties within half a mile, in a price band either side of his own. There were around 20 competing properties, and sales had been agreed on two thirds of them.

We run this check all over the country and typically see anything from 10% to 50%, so two thirds is about as healthy as local markets get. Better still, most of his competition were flats, and they were selling at an even higher rate.

So buyers were actively buying flats like his, within half a mile, right then. So the flat was never the problem. It just hadn't met its buyer yet, so the job was to not do anything drastic – and quietly buy back some time.

If you're weighing the same kind of decision, (wait or cut or switch), my free quiz will point you at the route that fits your property and your priorities. It takes about 60 seconds.

Hit the button below to get started:

Here's the plan we put together on the call.

How I'd sell a flat that's getting viewings but no offers

1. Hold your nerve until the numbers tell you otherwise.
   With viewings still rolling, there was a strong argument his buyer would simply show up within two or three weeks. The tripwire is the one-in-seven rule: 20 to 25 viewings with no offer means something needs to change.
2. Instruct a solicitor now, not when a buyer appears.
   The norm is to wait until a sale is agreed, but then nothing happens for two weeks while everyone waits on your paperwork, and the buyer's commitment drains away in the gap.
   
   So get every form returned early, and your solicitor can issue a contract on day one. It isn't the norm, but it gets you ahead.
3. Consider paying for the searches and the leasehold pack up front (optional).
   The local searches (around £250 to £300) and the leasehold management pack (often around £300) can each take two to six weeks to come back. And the searches normally only get ordered once a buyer's solicitor is up and running – which itself can take a couple of weeks.
   
   So if you order them now and they're sitting ready when a buyer shows up, it can pull completion forward by well over a month.
   
   The trade-off? If you haven't found a buyer within about three months, some of that money may need paying again. That's why agents and solicitors don't recommend it. So you're not being reckless if you skip it, but if you're serious about selling and you've got a deadline to try and meet, it can be some of the best money you spend in speeding up your sale.
4. If September arrives without an offer, add a second agent and re-run the valuations.
   Agents run out of steam on a property as their attention moves to newer stock, and a price cut with a tired agent can be like throwing a party that nobody shows up to. So make the changes land together: a fresh agent, fresh valuations and any price move, all at once.
   
   In this case, I leaned towards adding a second agent rather than replacing the first, because their current agent already had a high number of sales agreed on the competing flats nearby.
   
   When this is the case, I've tended to find that agent holds a live database of exactly your buyers.
   
   If you're going for two agents, insist on "winner takes all" for the fee, and expect the overall percentage fee you pay to rise a little as a result.
   
   If you receive lower valuations from agents, pay them real attention. (I say this having had something like 2,000+ agent valuations on properties I'm working on).
   
   Why are they worth taking seriously? Well, remember that agents have every incentive to value high to win your business. So when agents do give lower valuations, I've tended to find they're just being more honest.
   
   Rightmove's latest data (July 2026) shows homes priced right from day one find a buyer in around 36 days, while homes that need a reduction sit for around 127 days. So do take lower valuations seriously rather than dismissing them outright.
5. Make your agent cross-sell you to house-hunters.
   A large ground floor flat with a private garden offers much of what house-buyers want, but it never appears to buyers who set their Rightmove searches up to just look at houses.
   
   So put the agent on the spot. Ask them "who have you spoken with this month who's looking for a house, but who might be interested in this one?" Again and again we've found that doing some of the proactive thinking for your agent, and then feeding it to them, often shakes loose viewings that would never have happened otherwise.
6. Never tell the agent your bottom line.
   An agent's job is to get a deal done by the path of least resistance, so a bottom line gets quietly shopped to buyers, and someone who might have paid more now never will.
   
   The same goes for any concession you're holding back for after a survey takes place. The moment the agent knows you've got wiggle room, you're way more likely to have to give it up.
7. Don't list below the price you'd actually accept.
   Their agent's recommendation of an aggressive "Offers over £900,000" approach sounds like a clever way to spark a ton of competition. And it probably would.
   
   But if someone offers £920,000 (£20k over the asking price) and gets rejected because it isn't high enough, you're left with an annoyed buyer, a frustrated agent, and a sale that can very quickly lose momentum. So if you do set a lower "offers over" figure to try and force a faster sale, only set it at a number you'd genuinely take.
8. Let go of the price you paid.
   The £925,000 line was doing quiet damage, because it was an emotional number the sellers didn't want to go below (rather than a financial one).
   
   ‍Gov.uk's own inflation calculator (to June 2026) shows inflation in general has risen around 17% since they bought in 2022, so for them to truly break even on £925,000 property, it'd mean needing to sell for roughly £1,075,000 in today's money!
   
   So that real break-even is already long gone. Depressing, but true. I share it to try and be helpful though: let go of emotional anchors if they're just going to slow you down, and force you into decisions that might not make sense. Judge every offer on the facts of the day, not on a number from 2022.

And because the deadline was the whole reason for the call, we finished with expectations:

In July 2026, Rightmove announced leasehold sales are now taking 169 days to complete – and that's once you've found a buyer.

In other words, even if they find a buyer this month (August, at the time of writing), they shouldn't expect the sale to actually complete until late January.

Agonising, and unbelievable, but true.

Early November's therefore unlikely. But it makes all the points raised above even more important.

The realistic plan was to bank every week they could now, and accept the sale might still be in motion while they travelled.

If your deadline is harder than theirs was, I've written about how to sell your house fast for the best price, and it covers which corners can be cut safely and which ones cost you.

Is your flat actually struggling to sell?

If your own listing is getting traffic but no offers, the lessons from this call carry over:

• Count viewings against the one-in-seven rule.
  A dozen viewings with no offer is normal. Twenty five with no offer is a message. It's often about the price, but can be related to presentation, agent, and other issues.
• A deadline doesn't mean a discount route.
  Cash house buyers and auctions solve genuine emergencies. But for everyone else, they convert a timing worry into an enormous cost.
• Make your changes land together.
  A new agent, fresh valuations and a price move on the same day usually create one wave of interest instead of three ripples.
• Prepare the legal side before you have a buyer.
  Solicitor instructed, forms returned, and searches and management pack considered. Weeks banked now are weeks off the end.
• Forget what you paid.
  Inflation has already moved the goalposts, so the only question that matters is what it's worth to buyers today.

Every property and every seller is different though, and the right route depends on what you value most: speed, certainty, convenience, or price. I've written more about the best way to sell a house if you want the full picture.

Or, to cut straight to a personal answer: my free 60-second quiz looks at your property and your priorities, then points you at the selling method that fits.

Thanks for reading, and hit the button below to get started:

Frequently asked questions

1

How many viewings does it usually take to get an offer?

Sellers typically see around one offer for every seven viewings, so a home can take a dozen viewings or more before the first offer lands without anything being wrong. A property that passes 20 to 25 viewings with no offer has moved outside the normal range, and presentation, agent, or price may be an issue.

2

Why is my flat getting viewings but no offers?

Steady viewings with no offers often just reflects normal odds, because most viewers don't offer on most homes. Where it persists past 20 or so viewings, buyers are usually finding slightly better value elsewhere, which points at the asking price rather than the flat itself. Viewing numbers, not necessarily viewing feedback, are the signal to watch.

3

Should I reduce the price or change estate agent first?

Doing both at the same time gets a far bigger response than doing either alone. A price cut with an agent who has tired of the property often lands without much impact. So time the reduction to arrive with fresh energy, a second agent alongside the first or a replacement, and you get one proper relaunch instead of two damp ones.

4

Should I tell my estate agent the lowest price I'd accept?

Keeping your bottom line private protects your final sale price. An agent's incentive is to get a deal done, so a disclosed floor tends to get shared with buyers as "the sellers will take less", and buyers who might have paid above the asking price stop needing to. Share your asking price strategy with the agent, never your walk-away number.

5

Can I speed up conveyancing before I find a buyer?

A seller can bank serious time before a buyer exists: instruct a solicitor at listing, return every form, and consider ordering the local searches and, on a leasehold, the management pack up front. Those items take two to six weeks each, so having them ready can pull completion forward by a month or more, though some may need paying for again if no buyer appears within about three months.

6

Is "offers over" a good way to sell a flat quickly?

An "offers over" launch can build real momentum, but only when the number is one the seller would genuinely accept. Setting it below your true floor invites bids you'll have to reject, which sours buyers and agents and kills the momentum the strategy was meant to create. Set it at your real bottom line, so everything above is a bonus.