Home buyers failed to take up £32.4 billion worth of mortgages last year, partly due to worsening fall-throughs of property sales.
Mortgage cancellations climbed 36.4%, the largest annual jump in value in four years, with lenders contending with 134,057 cancellations in 2025, up 26.4% in 12 months.
The figures comes from Bank of England data for Monetary Financial Institutions (MFIs) analysed by Novus Strategy.
It claims avoidable fall-throughs have been getting worse.
Recent data released by TwentyCi show there were 303,538 fall-throughs of property transactions in 2025, an increase of 4.5% on the previous year.
This is despite new instructions and agreed sales rising just 2.3% and 2.1% respectively last year, according to the company.
The rising number of cancellations came as the number of mortgage approvals for home purchase increased 5.1% to 876,458 last year.
They were worth a combined £216.8 billion in 2025 (up 11.1%), which would equate to a cancellation rate of 14.9% by value, though there is a lag between approvals and cancellations.
Over the last few years, mortgage lenders have invested in shortening their ‘time to offer’ but this has limited impact on the speed at which most transactions progress.
Technology platforms, the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG), Land Registry and industry bodies such as the Open Property Data Association (OPDA) are all working towards open data standards and trust frameworks allowing transactions to complete faster.
A Novus spokesperson says: “While the myriad reasons that property transactions fall through may sound uncontrollable, the most powerful thing we can do to mitigate this is increase the speed at which transactions can complete.
“Everyone in the industry is acutely aware of this and it relies on moving out of the first phase of transformation, where business focused on internal digitalisation, to the second phase where we horizontally integrate for interoperability.
“This second phase is already happening through the work of MHCLG, DPMSG, OPDA and CFIT.”
