Everyone in a house sale wants to know the same thing: how long is this going to take. The honest answer has two halves, and the Island has never had either published.
The first half is how quickly homes are being sold at all. We measure that as months of supply — the number of homes currently for sale divided by the number of sales being registered each month. It is the standard measure of whether a market is tight or slack, and it needs two things: an accurate count of what is genuinely available, and a reliable sales rate. MyMove gathers the first from eleven Island agents. The Land Registry publishes the second.
The second half is the part nobody advertises: the gap between shaking hands and the sale being on the register. That is measurable directly from the Registry, because it records both dates.
Months of supply is a rate, not a stopwatch. It says how long it would take to clear the homes currently for sale if they sold at the rate of the past year. It does not say how long any individual house waits for a buyer, and the two are not the same number. A market with three months of supply still contains houses that sell in a week and houses that sit for a year. Where we say “an area clears in nine months”, read it as a description of the balance between supply and demand there, not as a prediction about a particular front door.
3.1 months
There are 488 homes genuinely available across the eleven agents we gather — that is after removing everything under offer, sale agreed or sold subject to contract, which cannot be bought unless a deal falls through. Against that, the Land Registry has been recording 159.9 residential sales a month over the most recent complete year.
Divide one by the other and the Island is carrying just over three months of housing stock.
That is a tight market. The convention in most property markets is that somewhere around five or six months of supply represents rough balance between buyers and sellers; below that, sellers have the advantage, and above it, buyers do. At 3.1 months the Isle of Man sits well inside seller territory. It also puts a number on an experience Island buyers describe constantly — that anything decent is gone before they have arranged a viewing.
One caution before this figure travels. We have measured stock accurately for a matter of weeks, so we can say what the balance is today but not whether it is tightening or easing. A year from now the same calculation will carry a direction as well as a level, and the direction will be the more useful of the two.
The three-month figure conceals an enormous spread. Broken down by area, the fastest part of the Island turns over its stock ten times quicker than the slowest.
| Area | Months of supply | Homes for sale | Sales per month | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ballasalla | 0.9 | 12 | 14.0 | |
| Peel | 1.1 | 13 | 12.1 | |
| Port Erin | 2.0 | 16 | 7.8 | |
| Onchan | 2.5 | 39 | 15.4 | |
| Maughold | 2.8 | 7 | 2.5 | |
| Douglas | 3.0 | 139 | 46.7 | |
| Lonan | 3.6 | 8 | 2.3 | |
| Ramsey | 3.6 | 61 | 17.1 | |
| Marown | 4.1 | 18 | 4.4 | |
| Castletown | 4.2 | 22 | 5.3 | |
| Kirk Michael | 4.4 | 17 | 3.8 | |
| Colby | 4.9 | 11 | 2.3 | |
| Laxey | 5.7 | 18 | 3.2 | |
| Port St Mary | 6.0 | 29 | 4.8 | |
| Andreas | 9.2 | 20 | 2.2 |
Ballasalla and Peel barely hold a month of stock between viewings. Andreas holds nine. Port St Mary and Laxey, both places people actively want to live, are carrying twice the Island average.
Douglas is worth reading on its own. It has 139 homes for sale, nearly a third of everything available on the Island, and it still sits at almost exactly the Island average. That is because it also does 46.7 sales a month — the volume is large at both ends. Douglas is not slow. It is simply where most of the market happens.
The practical reading for a buyer is that where you look changes the game you are playing. In Ballasalla or Peel a buyer is competing and should expect to move within days. In Andreas or Port St Mary a buyer has time, and rather more room to negotiate than the Island-wide figure suggests.
Twelve of the Island’s twenty-seven areas do not have enough activity to carry this measure, and we would rather name them than publish a number that moves on a single sale. An area needs at least 1.5 sales a month and at least six homes on the market before we will quote it.
Excluded, with what they actually have: Braddan (5 for sale, 3.3 sales/month), Santon (6, 1.0), Lezayre (3, 1.4), Sulby (4, 0.8), Bride (1, 0.5), Ballaugh (5, 1.1), Jurby (3, 2.1), St Johns (4, 1.0), Patrick (3, 1.7), Foxdale (2, 1.7), Arbory (4, 1.1), Rushen (1, 0.5).
Among the fifteen we do publish, the smaller ones deserve a lighter touch. Maughold, Lonan and Colby each have fewer than a dozen homes for sale, so two or three transactions move their figure noticeably. Douglas, Ramsey, Onchan and Port St Mary are the four where the number is on solid ground.
67 days
The Registry records the date terms were agreed and the date the transaction reached the register. The gap between them is the conveyancing and registration tail, and across 10,580 sales in the last five years the median is 67 days.
| From agreement to registration | Days |
|---|---|
| Fastest quarter complete within | 36 |
| Median | 67 |
| Slowest quarter take longer than | 109 |
Two months and a week is the middle case. A quarter of sales take more than three and a half months to get onto the register. That is the part of a move that no listing mentions and no agent controls, and it is worth building into any plan that involves a chain, a tenancy ending, or a school term.
Received wisdom, imported from across the water, says to put a house on the market in spring. Eleven years of Island transactions say otherwise.
Sorting every sale from 2015 to 2025 by the month terms were agreed, the pattern is consistent and unmistakable.
| Month | Share of the year’s sales | |
|---|---|---|
| January | 6.2% | |
| February | 7.1% | |
| March | 8.3% | |
| April | 7.3% | |
| May | 8.1% | |
| June | 8.0% | |
| July | 8.9% | |
| August | 9.3% | |
| September | 8.8% | |
| October | 9.6% | |
| November | 9.5% | |
| December | 9.0% |
October is the busiest month for agreeing a sale, and the second half of the year carries appreciably more of the market than the first. January is the quietest month, and it was the quietest month in every one of the eleven years examined — not once did it climb out of last place. A seller who lists in early January is putting their house into the thinnest market of the year.
The one broken year is 2020, where April collapsed to 2.3% for reasons that need no explanation. Every other year follows the same shape.
This is seasonality in when sales are agreed, taken from the Registry’s acquisition date rather than its registration date. Registration timing is an administrative artefact and would have told us nothing about the market. December is worth reading with care: it is a strong month here, but a share of it is likely to be transactions pushed to conclude before the year end rather than fresh demand arriving.
The obvious next question is which agents sell fastest. We are not going to answer it yet, and the reason is worth setting out, because the temptation to publish it is considerable and the number would be wrong.
MyMove has been recording the life of individual listings — when each appears, when it goes under offer, when it disappears — since early August. That is a thirty-one day window. Within it we have 49 measurable sales and a median of ten days from listing to sale agreed, with three quarters of them inside thirteen days.
Those numbers are nonsense, and the shape of them shows why. In a thirty-one day window you can only observe sales that completed inside thirty-one days. Everything slower is still in progress and invisible. The sample therefore contains the fast sales and nothing else, and the median it produces is a measure of our observation period rather than of the Island market. Publishing “Manx homes sell in ten days” would be an embarrassment, and rightly.
There is a second problem that more time alone will not fix. Agents publish different things:
Six of the eleven agents, covering about two thirds of all listings, would be measured wrongly. A league table built on that would not be reporting performance. It would be reporting which agents have the tidiest websites.
The Land Registry cannot settle it either: it records no agent against any sale. So the question is answerable only from our own observation, and only once that observation is long enough. On a market where sales take months, that means six to twelve months of recording. We started in August 2026. We will publish it when the data supports it and not before.
Two of these are cheap and would improve the picture for everyone, not only for us.