If you think the market slowdown has only just happened, think again. Jodie Kidd, Henry Witcomb and Skye Holland can tell you it has been going on for the past 12 months.

They are among thousands of disillusioned sellers who have had their homes on the market for a year or longer without finding a buyer.

Supermodel Kidd put her four-bedroom Sussex cottage, for which she paid £600,000 in 2001, on the market last summer for £775,000. After reducing the price to £695,000, there was still no sale. Kidd has now withdrawn the property from the market.

Witcomb is lucky. The lawyer has just sold his five-bedroom Islington terraced house. But it was on sale for more than a year and had £225,000 slashed from its original £1.3m asking price.

“We missed the best time to market it, around Easter 2004, and only put it up for sale later that spring,” he says. “We had one interested person early on, and a couple later, but then nobody serious until this summer.” He had to move out long before the house was sold because his job took him overseas.

“We’re disappointed at dropping the price, but you have to cut your cloth to suit the market,” says Witcomb, whose property was heavily redesigned to include a home cinema, resin floors and a decked courtyard garden.

Less lucky is Skye Holland, an art consultant who has been trying to sell her 1730 six-bedroom Grade II-listed town house in Wickham, Hampshire, since August 2004. Despite its location in a pretty village close to the M27, handy for London commuters, she has had no serious offers.

She says the problem was exacerbated by her original estate agent’s “complete lack of energy and motivation” in marketing her property. “By the time I changed agents, I’d missed the valuable end of a more buoyant market,” she says. The price of her house has now been cut from £850,000 to £595,000.

“It was totally refurbished in the 1990s. It’s suitable for people who work from home, and it’s only 90 minutes from central London. It’s really going for a song,” she says.

Estate agents say the one-year sale is now common across all sectors of the market. In Somerset, for example, a three-bedroom almshouse in the village of Stogumber has been on sale since June 2004, even though the selling agent, Jackson-Stops & Staff, has now slashed the price from £395,000 to £325,000.

Thirty miles away in Exeter — the UK city with the fastest-growing house prices in early 2004, according to the Halifax bank — a four- bedroom Edwardian house with an acre of grounds has been on sale since last summer, despite its original £725,000 asking price being chopped to £675,000 by the agent Strutt & Parker.

Sales of new-build homes have also slumped badly. Some flats in central Leeds, Birmingham and Bristol have been on the market for over a year, despite price reductions and incentives such as having stamp duty and purchase costs paid by the builder or the sales agent. Developers used to purchase the homes of buyers in part-exchange deals. But the developers, too, are now unable to sell on older properties quickly.

“In the light of the slow second-hand market, we’ve severely limited our use of part-exchange,” says a spokeswoman for George Wimpey, one of Britain’s largest housebuilders. It says its 2005 sales are 17.5% down on last year’s, and claims the UK property market is in its worst condition for 15 years.

A new report by the Nationwide building society, analysing the new and second-hand property market, shows a 37.2% drop in sales across the whole UK in the first three months of 2005, compared with the same time in 2004. Some regions show even bigger decreases, with Wales the worst hit, down 45%.

“There’s a huge choice for buyers today, and as a result they take an age to decide. When they do take the plunge, they’re looking over their shoulders in case prices are falling or better deals appear. Therefore, many sales fall through. Even those that succeed involve months of discussion and uncertainty. A house can easily languish on the market for a year or more,” says Gideon Sumption of Stacks, a buying agency.

The few property firms thriving in the slowdown are so-called chain-breaking agents. These buy homes at well below their market value, usually from vendors whose offers on other properties have been accepted but who cannot sell their own quickly.

Chain-breakers typically pay 75%-95% of the property’s value, depending on its condition and location, and how quickly it can be sold on.

“We’ve had double the number of calls so far this year than in the same period of 2004,” says David Harber, marketing manager of one of Britain’s largest chain- breaking agencies, National Homebuyers. “Business picks up in September when sellers realise they’ve missed the boat and the buying year is effectively over. Last August, we had 5,000 calls, and then 20,000 in September — we expect far more this year.”

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