It is a recurring theme that plays in my head from my days selling pensions to my peers back in the 1980s and 1990s (when it was my job).

“My house is my pension”

Those of us. many of us, who had purchased at up to 100% of the value of the property were sitting on equity that so outweighed the value of our personal pensions to make the comparison useless, we would have enough money from property to sell up or rent out of borrow against our property and what was the need of saving pounds a month into a pension pot?

What we did not expect is what many people have got, a maudlin market and in some cases, such as leaseholds in London, a falling market. The FT report the widespread incidence of people selling their flats at a loss.

Valentina Romei reports for the FT.  A higher proportion of homes in London were sold at a loss than any other region in England and Wales last year, according to a study, in the latest sign of weakness in the capital’s property market.

Hamptons’ analysis of Land Registry data shows that 14.8 per cent of London sellers sold for less in 2025 than they originally paid, above the national average of 8.7 per cent.

It is happening in my block where people at flat-holder meetings say they are not selling because they can’t cover their mortgage or because it leaves so little equity that there is insufficient to make the move to anywhere they like (they live in a lovely place in the City of London).

But one person said to me that she had hoped that she could sell her home to give her cash in retirement to “bump up” here meagre retirement savings and I suspect that more in the room were of the view that the place in the City might be worth some release of equity. The harsh reality of the situation came over us when we found we were all in the same boat.

Of course it is worse for leaseholders, caught in the grasp of freeholders with ground rents and service charges making it feel like renting (even when on 90 year leases).

Aneisha Beveridge, head of research at Hamptons, said:

“In London, upward house price growth is no longer the one-way bet it once seemed.

In some cases, even owners who bought a decade ago still face getting back less than they paid, something that would have been almost unthinkable in the heady days of 2015,”

she added.

This is the picture that Hampton have found from their research.

There are very few “flat for sale” signs up in my part of the City. Many of us are waiting for some news from the Government to get our neck out of the noose that freeholders have it in. But it is more than just the leaseholder problems, the fact is that property in London and the posh areas around it, is no longer a deliverer of pensions through the owning of property.

I’m sorry but that fool you remember coming to your door with a fact-find and an application for a personal pension may have had to be right at some point, It took many years for the euphoria of property ownership to turn to ennui but it has.

My property will not be my pension and never should have been thought of being. Pensions are the sensible way forward, boring as their progression may seem. We in London are just learning how it feels in other parts of the country!