Freehold and leasehold are different markets. The £/m² data proves it

Tenure is the quiet variable in British house prices. Freehold means the property and its land, outright and forever; leasehold means a long lease on it, usually with ground rent and service charges attached and a clock, however slow, running in the background. Houses are mostly freehold, flats are almost always leasehold, and because the two trade on different per-square-metre curves, tenure is baked into every comparison whether you look at it or not. Better to look at it.

The gap is real, and it points both ways

From the 12 months of sold prices to June 2026: in SW11, Battersea, freehold sales ran at £10,100/m² against £8,760/m² for leasehold, a 15% premium for owning the ground under the Victorian terraces. In E16, Canning Town, it points the other way: £5,650/m² freehold against £6,010/m² leasehold, because the leasehold stock there is dominated by new riverside flats while the freehold stock is older terraced housing. Same country, same year, opposite gaps, and both make sense once you know what is actually being sold.

Elsewhere the pattern is more typical: LS6, Leeds £3,410 freehold against £2,880 leasehold; DE1, Derby £2,390 against £1,900; EX1, Exeter £3,700 against £2,825. As a rule the freehold premium per square metre is largest where the leasehold stock is older flats, and smallest, or inverted, where it is new ones.

Why you should split before you compare

A single district median blends both markets at whatever ratio they happened to trade this year, which creates a trap: a district can look like it moved when only its mix did. A year heavy in flat sales drags the blended £/m² down without a single home changing value. It is the same illusion that makes city centres look cheap per metre, their stock is flats, and flats carry service obligations a terraced house does not.

Every district page on this site lets you switch the headline statistics between all tenures, freehold only and leasehold only, each with its own matched-sale count. If you are buying a flat, judge it against the leasehold figures; a house, against freehold. Comparing a leasehold flat against a blended median flatters the flat.

What the £/m² split cannot see

Tenure statistics count what sold, not the terms it sold on. Lease length, ground rent escalators, service charges and cladding remediation all price into individual leasehold sales without appearing as columns in the Land Registry record. A leasehold figure well under its district’s leasehold median often has one of those stories attached, which makes the data a prompt for questions, not a substitute for reading the lease. None of the figures here value any particular home.

Check the tenure split for your own area on its district page, or read the ten-minute asking-price check for the full method. Figures: HM Land Registry sold prices matched to EPC floor areas, 12 months to June 2026, rebuilt monthly.