Same landlords, louder warning, two quarters of data the government won’t hear

For the first time, the Property118 Landlord Sentiment Survey has something it never had before: a like-for-like comparison. Two quarters in, the message is not that landlords are in trouble. It is that they have made a decision.

When more than 2,000 landlords answered the same questions three months apart, the striking finding was not how much had changed, but how little. The shape of the sector barely moved between Q1 and Q2. What moved was the mood.

The fundamentals held firm

Almost everything that describes who these landlords are stayed remarkably steady. Ownership structures scarcely shifted, with around six in ten still holding property in their personal names. Gearing remained conservative: close to three in ten landlords have no mortgage at all, and roughly four in ten are either mortgage-free or geared below 30% loan-to-value. Only around 9% are geared above 70%.

The tenant mix held too. Working tenants continue to dominate the sector by a wide margin, and self-management remains the most common approach, even if a few more landlords have begun handing the work to agents.

This is not a picture of a sector on the edge of collapse. It is a picture of a financially resilient sector with substantial equity buffers. That resilience matters, because it explains why the widely predicted wave of forced sales never arrived.

So why are they leaving?

Here is the point. If landlords were being forced out by financial distress, we would expect to see it in the gearing figures and in rising arrears. We do not. These landlords are not being pushed out. A growing number are choosing to leave.

Between Q1 and Q2, pessimism about property values deepened, the intention to sell or exit strengthened, and the single biggest incentive that would tempt landlords back, a reversal of Section 24, remained exactly where it was: unaddressed.

That distinction, distress versus decision, is the whole story. A sector in temporary difficulty waits for confidence to return. A sector making a considered judgement does not. It acts.

The comparison is itself the finding

A single survey tells you what landlords think on one day. Two surveys, asked identically, tell you the direction of travel. And the direction is one in which caution is hardening into something more permanent.

It is worth being clear about what this data is not. It is not the voice of a handful of disgruntled operators. The respondents are overwhelmingly UK tax resident, they own real portfolios, and between them they represent tens of thousands of tenancies. When they say, quarter after quarter, that they are more likely to sell than to buy, that is a supply signal worth taking seriously.

A message policymakers keep ignoring

The government has form for looking past its own evidence. Its own English Housing Survey showed that landlord-led endings were a minority of tenancy endings before the Renters’ Rights Act came into force. Its own impact assessments have conceded added costs for landlords from Making Tax Digital. And now an independent quarterly tracker is showing, in consistent numbers, that the private rented sector is contracting by choice.

The tenants these landlords house will need somewhere else to go. Social housing waiting lists are already at record levels, and housebuilding remains well short of target. A shrinking private rented sector does not make that problem smaller.

The message from two quarters of data is the same as the message from one, only louder. Without meaningful reform, or at the very least a pause in the pace of change, the supply of privately rented homes looks set to keep contracting. We will keep asking these questions every quarter. The question is whether anyone in a position to act is listening.

Visit Survey Results Page