Which UK cities are most new-build heavy? 2024 city-by-city share
In 2024, just under one in ten English and Welsh property sales was a new build — but the national average hides enormous local variation. In Salford the figure was 32.7%. In Plymouth it was 3.3%. The ten-fold gap matters: in new-build-heavy markets, buyers are competing with developer pricing and incentive packages every weekend; in resale-dominated markets they are not.
This piece ranks 25 major UK cities by their 2024 new-build share, identifies the standout growth markets, and explains the structural reasons one city can run an order of magnitude above another.
The national picture: 9.4% of 2024 sales were new builds
Across 921,873 sales registered with HM Land Registry in 2024, 86,341 were flagged as new builds — a 9.4% share, the lowest of the past seven years.
| Year | Total sales | New-build sales | New-build share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 1,030,262 | 130,553 | 12.7% |
| 2019 | 1,005,618 | 131,755 | 13.1% |
| 2020 | 892,053 | 112,955 | 12.7% |
| 2021 | 1,274,474 | 135,376 | 10.6% |
| 2022 | 1,070,810 | 132,037 | 12.3% |
| 2023 | 856,109 | 97,509 | 11.4% |
| 2024 | 921,873 | 86,341 | 9.4% |
Source: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, queried 22 May 2026. The 2025 figure has been excluded because new-build sales register with HM Land Registry on a multi-month lag after legal completion; the 2025 share currently reads 4.1% in the file but will rise as late registrations are added. The Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities also publishes a separate net-additions series which counts dwellings rather than transactions and is methodologically distinct.
The downward drift between 2022 and 2024 broadly tracks slower volume in the new-build supply chain — fewer site starts in 2022-23 feed through to fewer completions and registrations in 2024 — but the more interesting story is which cities sit far above or far below the national line.
Major-city ranking (2024)
The 25 largest cities by total transaction volume in 2024, ranked by new-build share:
| City | Total sales | New-build sales | NB share | Avg price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Preston | 5,717 | 1,024 | 17.9% | £253k |
| Derby | 5,757 | 965 | 16.8% | £275k |
| York | 5,237 | 722 | 13.8% | £401k |
| Northampton | 5,327 | 725 | 13.6% | £371k |
| Norwich | 6,905 | 866 | 12.5% | £322k |
| Manchester | 15,536 | 1,898 | 12.2% | £316k |
| Swindon | 4,564 | 540 | 11.8% | £316k |
| Newcastle upon Tyne | 6,451 | 746 | 11.6% | £280k |
| Hull | 5,218 | 605 | 11.6% | £172k |
| Doncaster | 5,656 | 647 | 11.4% | £213k |
| Leeds | 10,691 | 1,211 | 11.3% | £306k |
| Liverpool | 11,221 | 1,199 | 10.7% | £233k |
| Coventry | 5,368 | 539 | 10.0% | £290k |
| Nottingham | 12,569 | 1,205 | 9.6% | £298k |
| Bradford | 5,337 | 503 | 9.4% | £184k |
| Sheffield | 9,575 | 880 | 9.2% | £280k |
| London | 65,868 | 6,013 | 9.1% | £960k |
| Leicester | 7,348 | 596 | 8.1% | £327k |
| Stoke-on-Trent | 6,254 | 474 | 7.6% | £216k |
| Bristol | 13,894 | 1,033 | 7.4% | £444k |
| Southampton | 6,648 | 488 | 7.3% | £367k |
| Birmingham | 12,710 | 848 | 6.7% | £291k |
| Cardiff | 5,465 | 337 | 6.2% | £403k |
| Reading | 5,238 | 323 | 6.2% | £518k |
| Plymouth | 4,663 | 156 | 3.3% | £266k |
Source: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data joined to the address-level town field, sales dated 2024, queried 22 May 2026. Avg price is the mean across all sales in the city, not the new-build subset.
Three things stand out:
- Preston (17.9%) and Derby (16.8%) head the major-city ranking. Both have hosted sustained estate-scale delivery over the past five years, and both show prices roughly £40k below the new-build average — consistent with smaller-format units priced below the regional resale market.
- Plymouth (3.3%) is the major-city outlier in the other direction. Plymouth has shown the same pattern for several years (5.3% in 2023, 6.7% in 2022). The city's planning constraints, geography and existing stock profile mean new delivery rarely tops 200 units a year against a 4,000+ resale market.
- Cardiff and Reading both at 6.2%. Both are expensive markets with limited large-site delivery within the city boundary — most of the new-build supply that buyers would consider Cardiff or Reading sits in surrounding local authorities that don't share the town name in the Land Registry file.
The new-build growth markets
If you expand beyond the largest cities to all towns with at least 1,500 sales in 2024, a tighter group emerges where new builds dominate the local market:
| Town | Total sales | New-build sales | NB share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Salford | 2,200 | 720 | 32.7% |
| Wellingborough | 1,744 | 458 | 26.3% |
| Milton Keynes | 4,349 | 937 | 21.5% |
| Rugby | 2,094 | 427 | 20.4% |
| Nuneaton | 2,008 | 396 | 19.7% |
| Chesterfield | 3,476 | 686 | 19.7% |
| Spalding | 1,680 | 310 | 18.5% |
| Preston | 5,717 | 1,024 | 17.9% |
| Newark | 1,922 | 337 | 17.5% |
| Exeter | 3,049 | 531 | 17.4% |
Source: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data, 2024 sales, queried 22 May 2026. Sample restricted to towns with at least 1,500 registered sales.
Salford sits well above every other town in the file. The next three — Wellingborough, Milton Keynes and Rugby — are well-known growth corridors with active local plans and sustained large-site delivery. The Salford figure deserves its own paragraph.
Why Salford sits at 32.7%
Salford's new-build share is not a one-year anomaly. The 2022-2024 trajectory in the Land Registry file is 26.9% → 31.9% → 32.7%, rising over a period when the UK figure fell from 12.3% to 9.4%. The town is structurally building faster than the national average and accelerating.
The explanation is geographic: Salford's largest postcode districts (M3, M5 and M50) cover the redeveloped riverside corridor between MediaCity, Salford Quays and Manchester's Chapel Street regeneration zone. These areas have absorbed several thousand apartment completions across multiple build-to-sell phases over the past decade. By contrast, Salford's pre-existing stock is dominated by smaller-format terraced housing — so each new apartment phase contributes disproportionately to the transactional share.
The price profile reinforces this. The average new-build sale in Salford in 2024 was £201k, against an average resale of £322k — a £121k gap in the opposite direction to most cities, where new builds typically command a premium. Most of the new build supply is one- and two-bed apartments; most of the resale supply is family houses. The like-for-like comparison would be apartment-to-apartment, where the new-build price actually sits at a premium per square foot.
If you want to see what the Salford market looks like address-by-address, the postcode tool covers every road in M5 — for example, M5 3WH, one of the densest residential postcodes in the area, returns 364 properties with full transaction history and EPC data.
How a high local new-build share changes what buyers face
For buyers, the practical consequences of a high new-build share split four ways:
- Pricing transparency is asymmetric. Resale prices are anchored by recent comparable sales on the same street. New-build prices are set by the developer's release schedule and incentive package, which means the same nominal asking price can carry very different effective value depending on the deposit contribution, stamp duty offer or part-exchange terms attached.
- Service charges and ground rents materially change the running cost. In high-rise apartment markets — Salford, central Manchester, parts of London and Birmingham — service charges of £2,500-£4,000 per year are common, and uncapped ground rents on older leasehold flats have been a recurring complaint. We covered the typical range in detail in our guide to new-build service charges.
- Resale value behaves differently. New builds tend to trail the UK House Price Index in the first 3-5 years after sale (the "new-build premium" unwinds), then re-converge. We analysed this with HPI-controlled price tracking in our piece on new-build depreciation.
- The cost stack is different from a resale purchase. Survey expectations, snagging budgets, conveyancing complexity and warranty coverage all change. The trade-offs are laid out in our pillar guide on new-build vs resale costs.
For a buyer in a city where new builds account for 17% or more of the market — Preston, Derby, Salford, Milton Keynes — these factors are not edge cases; they sit in the middle of the choice set.
A note on the data
The Land Registry's new_build flag is set at the point of first registration. It captures the first sale of a newly-built dwelling but does not capture future resales of the same unit — so a 2018-built flat resold in 2024 appears in the resale column, not the new-build column. That is the correct treatment for a "share of 2024 sales" question, which is what this analysis answers.
City grouping uses the address-level town field supplied with each Land Registry record. The field is consistent across years and across postal sectors, but does not always match modern local authority boundaries. "Salford" in this file is the town as labelled by HM Land Registry, not the Salford City Council administrative area, which is wider.
Other Homecost analyses sit in the market analysis category, including bunching at SDLT thresholds and the cost-comparison series.
Takeaway for buyers
The headline number — Salford 32.7%, UK 9.4% — is mostly a story about supply. Cities with active local plans and large brownfield sites carry a structurally higher new-build share than cities with constrained geography or planning friction. Whether that matters to an individual buyer depends on whether the new-build cost stack (service charge, warranty, depreciation curve, developer pricing) is one they want to take on.
The numbers above tell you the probability of being shown a new build in each city's listing pool. They do not tell you whether to buy one. Speak to a qualified adviser before acting.