London property market: the headlines, checked against the sold record

MoneyWeek puts the London average at £542,065 in March 2026, down 2% on a year earlier. That is an average across all London sales; our own median across the 17 districts we report is £575,000. The two sit within about 6% of each other, which is close for figures built from different baskets of homes, so the level MoneyWeek quotes is credible.

The part a single sold snapshot cannot settle is the direction. A 2% fall is a change over time, and our figure here is a position, not a trend line: we can say the level is consistent with MoneyWeek's, but we cannot from this page alone confirm or deny the slide. What we will not do is borrow their £542,065 and reprint it as a London number. The £575,000 above is ours, measured the same way for every district.

Zoopla's read is that London prices have, on balance, not moved. A flat market is exactly the kind of claim a single sold snapshot is well placed to ground rather than rate: it cannot tell you prices held steady all year, but it can tell you the level they are sitting at now. Across our 17 districts that level is a median of £575,000, spanning £446,224 in the most affordable district we track to £1.3 million at the top.

Set against that spread, 'not moved' reads less as a forecast and more as a description of a wide, segmented market where the cheaper and dearer ends can pull in opposite directions and net out flat. The £10,479 per square metre we record is the better like-for-like gauge if you want to compare a London flat with one elsewhere, because it strips out the effect of simply buying more space.

This is the one claim on the page our sold record genuinely cannot speak to. 'Sales agreed' counts deals that have gone under offer but not yet completed and registered; our data is the opposite end of that pipe, completed sales with a recorded price. The two can move apart for months, which is why we mark this beyond what the sold record can confirm rather than pretend otherwise.

For context, not confirmation: we count roughly 1,143 recorded completed sales across the 17 districts in the last 12 months, at a median of 77 days to sell. A rising agreed-sales figure today would only show up in numbers like those later, once the deals complete. If activity really is the strongest of any region, the sold record is where it will eventually land, and we will report it when it does.

This is the official line from the same data family we build on, HM Land Registry sold prices processed by the ONS, so it is less a claim to check than a national frame to place our local figure inside. London being the weakest English region for annual house-price growth is consistent with the flat-to-falling picture the other three sources describe.

What our page adds is the level beneath the percentage. A 2.1% fall for London is a rate of change; the £575,000 median across our 17 districts is the standing figure that change is acting on. Both matter: the ONS tells you the tide, the sold record tells you the water line.