How Long It Takes to Sell a Home, Country by Country

Published on: August 19, 2026

Last verified: 19 August 2026. Marketing-time figures are snapshots of moving markets and should be read as orders of magnitude, not constants.

Quick answer: There are three clocks in any sale and countries publish different ones, so cross-country days-on-market tables are usually comparing incompatible instruments. Marketing time runs from listing to accepted offer. Legal time runs from agreement to money in your account, and that alone is 30 to 45 days in the United States, 12 to 20 weeks in England and Wales, and around 3 months in France. Then there is fall-through risk: roughly a third of agreed sales in England and Wales collapse before exchange, because nothing is binding until then. Liquidity, not the headline number, is what decides whether an overseas property was a good idea.

Buyers research entry endlessly and exit almost never. There are detailed guides to purchase timelines in every market, including our own, and comparatively little on the question that decides whether an overseas property was actually a good idea: how long does it take to turn it back into money?

This is a harder question than it looks, because the number everyone quotes, days on market, is not one metric. It is at least four different metrics wearing the same name, and comparing a US figure with a UK figure is closer to comparing a marathon time with a half marathon time than most published comparisons admit.

The measurement problem, stated plainly

There are three clocks running in any sale, and countries publish different ones.

Clock 1: marketing time. From the listing going live to a buyer's offer being accepted. This is what most portal indices publish.

Clock 2: legal time. From accepted offer to the transfer being legally complete and the money in your account. In some countries this is a few weeks. In others it is four months.

Clock 3: preparation and failure time. The weeks before listing, and the sales that collapse and start again. Neither shows up in any headline statistic.

On top of that, the definitional details differ. Does the clock stop at offer accepted or at closing? Does a relisted property reset to day zero? Are private, off-market and developer sales included? Is the figure a mean or a median, and is it seasonally adjusted?

Even within one country the answer moves. In the United States, Redfin measures listing to pending offer and NAR measures a different span, and the two routinely differ by twenty days or more for the same market at the same time. Any table claiming that country A sells in 32 days and country B in 41 is usually comparing two incompatible instruments.

So this guide gives you the metric alongside the number, and separates marketing time from legal time.

Marketing time: the published figures

These are the most recent widely reported figures at the time of writing, August 2026. They are snapshots of moving markets, and should be read as orders of magnitude rather than precise constants.

Two structural cautions apply to every line in that table.

National averages are almost useless at the property level. Within the United States, spring 2026 metro medians ranged from under three weeks in the tightest inventory markets to well over two months in markets with a construction overhang. Within the United Kingdom, parts of Scotland were agreeing sales in around two weeks while London averaged four times that. A national number tells you nothing about a specific coastal village.

The foreign-buyer segment is a market within a market. A resort apartment sold mainly to overseas buyers has a demand pool that is seasonal, sentiment driven and correlated with the buyers' home currency, not with the local market you read about in the index.

Legal time: the part nobody budgets for

Once you have a buyer, the clock does not stop. This is where the country differences become enormous and where they are also much more stable and predictable than marketing time.

Add the two clocks together and a realistic UK sale runs five to six months from listing to money, while a comparable Spanish sale can run three. That is a genuine structural difference in liquidity, and it is invisible in any days-on-market comparison.

The number that matters more than either: fall-through risk

In England and Wales, roughly a third of agreed sales collapse before exchange. Because nothing is binding until exchange, either party can walk away, and a chain multiplies every party's ability to break it. A seller who agrees in March and loses the buyer in June restarts at week zero, in a worse season, with a property that now looks stale on the portals.

Contrast the civil law model. In France, Spain, Italy and Germany, the preliminary stage carries real financial consequences: a deposit that is forfeited or repayable at double, or in Germany a deed signed in front of a notary from the outset. Buyers still withdraw, usually where a suspensive condition such as a mortgage approval fails, but casual withdrawal is expensive rather than free.

This is why the honest answer to "how long does it take to sell" is a probability distribution, not a number. The right question is: what proportion of sales in this market complete on first agreement, and what happens to the ones that do not?

What actually drives liquidity

Six variables explain most of the difference between a market where you can exit in eight weeks and one where you cannot exit at all.

1. Transaction costs on the buyer's side. Where purchase taxes and fees run to 10 to 15 percent of the price, buyers must hold for longer to break even, which thins the pool of people prepared to buy the kind of property you are selling. High friction markets are structurally less liquid in both directions.

2. Mortgage availability for your likely buyer. If your buyer pool is mostly non-resident and non-resident lending in that country is capped at 60 to 70 percent loan to value, you have excluded most of the market before you list.

3. Depth of the local buyer pool. A property that only makes sense to a foreign second-home buyer has one demand channel. A property that a local family would also buy has two. The second is far more resilient in a downturn, which is exactly when you are most likely to be selling.

4. Inventory overhang. Months of supply, the share of listings with price reductions, and the ratio of new listings to sales tell you more about your future exit than any average.

5. Seasonality. In holiday markets, viewing traffic is concentrated into a few months. Missing the window is not a delay of weeks, it is a delay of a year.

6. The stock itself. Standard, replicable homes near employment and transport clear quickly. Unusual properties clear slowly everywhere: very large, very rural, unusual layouts, poor energy ratings, complicated access, or a title with a defect that a buyer's lawyer will need to explain to them.

The extra weeks that apply only to foreign owners

If you are a non-resident selling, budget for a set of steps a local seller does not face.

• Tax identification. You need a valid local tax number, and if yours has lapsed or was never properly registered, reactivating it takes time.
• Withholding at source. Several countries require the buyer to withhold a percentage of the price and pay it directly to the tax authority against your capital gains liability. In Spain the non-resident retention is a well known example. You recover any excess by filing, which takes months.
• Clearance and certificates. Energy performance certificates, habitation or occupancy certificates, condominium debt certificates and municipal tax clearances all have lead times, and several must be current at the date of signing rather than at the date of listing.
• Signing from abroad. If you cannot attend, you need a power of attorney, usually notarised in your own country and often apostilled and translated. Start this at least a month before you expect to sign.
• Repatriating the proceeds. Bank compliance on an outbound transfer of sale proceeds to a foreign account can add weeks, particularly if the account receiving the money is not in the same name as the seller.

None of these are hard. All of them are slow, and all of them are much slower when started after a buyer is found rather than before the property is listed.

How to assess exit risk before you buy

The value of all this is prospective. Before committing to a purchase, ask the questions that reveal liquidity rather than the ones that reveal price:

1. How many comparable units are currently listed within a short radius, and how many actually sold in the past twelve months? A ratio, not an anecdote.
2. What share of listings have had a price reduction?
3. Who is the second buyer? Not the person selling to you, but the person who will buy it from you. If the honest answer is "someone exactly like me", the pool is narrow.
4. Can a local resident finance this property at a normal loan to value? If not, ask why.
5. Is there a registry of actual transacted prices, or only asking prices? Asking price data systematically overstates the health of a slow market.
6. What did this exact property sell for last time, and when? A long ownership history with no resale is sometimes loyalty and sometimes illiquidity.

If the answers point to a thin market, the property may still be a fine place to spend twenty summers. It is simply not a liquid asset, and it should not be modelled as one. Our companion piece on what to do when an overseas property will not sell deals with the situation once you are already in it.

Frequently asked questions

What is the single best cross-country comparison of selling times?
There is not one, and any source presenting a clean cross-country table is almost certainly mixing metrics. Compare marketing time to marketing time, and legal time to legal time, using each country's own published series.

Does a lower asking price always shorten the sale?
Pricing accuracy is consistently the strongest lever a seller controls, in every market with published data. But in a genuinely thin market, price cuts can chase a falling bid rather than meet it, which is a different problem from mispricing.

Do the first two weeks really matter that much?
Portal traffic to a new listing peaks immediately and decays sharply. Alerts to registered buyers fire once. A listing that launches at the wrong price spends its highest attention period being ignored, and relaunching later does not recover it.

Is it faster to sell to a cash buyer?
It removes the financing condition, which is one of the two most common causes of collapse. It does not remove searches, title work, certificates or notarial scheduling.

Should I sell through a local agent or an international portal?
That depends entirely on who your buyer is. If your realistic buyer pool is domestic, local channels dominate. If it is international, you need to be visible in the buyer's own language, which is a different distribution problem. See our overview of the leading property portal in each country.

Keep reading on JanusHermes

Exit liquidity is the least researched part of a cross-border purchase and the one that decides the return. JanusHermes lists property from local agencies in 11 languages, with the local agency's own contact details on every listing.

On the other side of the same clock, see how long it takes to buy, country by country and seasonality in overseas markets. On selling, read how to sell property abroad, what to do when it will not sell and who pays estate agent commission by country. On modelling the return properly, see how to calculate ROI on international real estate.

Figures in this article reflect publicly reported data as at August 2026 and are snapshots of markets that move. They are provided for general information and are not a valuation, a forecast, or investment advice, and they create no advisory relationship. Always obtain local professional advice on the timing, tax treatment and legal process of a sale in the relevant country. JanusHermes accepts no liability for actions taken based on this content.

Primary sources: Redfin published median days-on-market series and its metro-level breakdowns, spring 2026; National Association of Realtors days-on-market reporting; Zoopla UK house price and time-to-sell indices; national notarial and conveyancing bodies for completion timelines in France, Spain, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands; and published UK fall-through rate reporting for England and Wales.