BlackRock isn’t buying your street. The truth is actually far more disturbing.
There’s a growing narrative that giant institutions like BlackRock are buying up Britain’s suburban housing stock and pushing ordinary renters out of the market, but the reality is more complicated, and arguably more worrying.
The large institutional funds are not the slightest bit interested in your average three-bedroom semi, ex-council flats, or the ageing Victorian terraces. They’ don’t seem to be too excited about building houses with gardens for young families either. What they want are modern, ‘cookie cutter’, purpose-built apartment blocks in major cities. The type of property that appeals to younger professionals without children and with incomes around the higher rate tax bracket.
If that’s the lifestyle you want for now and you’re able to afford to live in one of those properties, then you can expect concierge desks, resident gyms, co-working lounges, app-based maintenance reporting and professionally branded living environments. Now all of that might sound wonderful if you are a young professional earning good money in a major city, because there is a growing supply of high-specification Build to Rent accommodation aimed directly at you.
That is the Build to Rent sector.
Meanwhile, government policy has systematically increased pressure on smaller landlords through income tax, higher SDLT surcharges, tougher EPC proposals, expanding compliance obligations, and the Renters Right Act, to name just a few!
Increasingly, and we see this every week through the work we do at Property118, rental properties that are not being sold are being diverted into emergency and temporary accommodation contracts operated through outsourcing providers such as Serco and similar organisations. That changes the nature of the rental market completely, because the landlord who owned three houses locally, knew the tenants personally, and answered the phone when the boiler failed, is gradually disappearing from many areas.
The result is that if you are a family on an ordinary income looking for a three-bedroom suburban house with a garden near decent schools, you have an increasingly worrying problem. There are still some landlords in the market, but pressure on their costs of compliance combined with a huge surge in demand is sending rents stratospheric. Some say that rent caps would fix that problem, but the reality is that it would simply reduce supply as more landlords choose to sell up while others decide that letting to the likes of Serco to house asylum seekers is the better option. The latter creates other problems such as racism, and that impacts Policing costs, and all the while our elected leaders act like the three wise monkeys.
Any thoughts?
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Tenant demand is rising as home supply falls - RICS
Member Since June 2019 - Comments: 841
2:54 PM, 19th May 2026, About 3 weeks ago
They are not just looking away, they are pointing the finger at us – no cheap house blame those pesky landlords.
Member Since November 2022 - Comments: 69
9:55 AM, 20th May 2026, About 3 weeks ago
Blackrock doesn’t buy the bricks an mortar, they buy the securities. This is more subversive and they get just the right amount of control with the least amount of hassle. Look up David Rogers-Webb https://thegreattaking.com/about-this-book
The core problem, that must be always put forward is that everything is a product/symptom/knock-on of Central Bank “money” printing.
It really is that simple if you understand how everything flows from that principle. What is not simple is the mess we have been left with by 100+ years of currency debasement. Our economy has been hollowed out by this mechanism, and the beneficiaries are “off-shore”, so we are left holding the bag.
As landlords we have benefitted by the asset inflation through currency debasement. In effect, we ride that wave. We trade interest rates and leverage where possible to reinvest or reduce cost. The ever increasing value of property is proportional to the money printing as the way they get the money into the system is by making mortgage rates attractive.
What needs to support that is the ability of people to service the loans or cover the rents that service the loans. We are now at a fairly sticky point. Housing prices remain high, due to the loose money system of low rates, cost of living has gone up due to all sorts of other globalist scams (fake pandemics, net zero, and wars etc), so the demand side of the housing market does not have enough pressure to drive it further unless the interest rates come down. Puppet-gov needs lower interest rates because of the Usury they have exposed us to by spending beyond our means, but bringing rates lower devalues the Pound and so it’s a lose lose. Lower rates will support the housing market, but in the long term it makes the country more feudal. Requiring more social housing needed, less ability to acquire that social housing, so they make laws to compel landlords to take DSS… Vicious circle of decline.
Think of it like an addict that needs a fix to keep going, eventually overdosing. The drug-dealer is the central banking cartel.
The game is Usury, the creditors own you, it was a crime that was punishable by death btw, that was repealed. I wonder why…
Everything we are seeing is symptom of the underlying instability of the value of our currency, but they will keep you focussed on the symptoms and not the cause.
Member Since January 2015 - Comments: 1496 - Articles: 1
10:31 AM, 20th May 2026, About 3 weeks ago
For me, and others, the writing was on the wall for long term landlords with portfolios not in Ltd’s, and not cost effective to now do it, or with less than say 20 properties or whose children wanted nothing to do with being a PRS landlord, was the Renters Reform Bill.
Labour’s Renters Rights Bill confirmed, certainly for me, giving tenants s21s and selling up was the way to go.
Member Since July 2013 - Comments: 476 - Articles: 1
11:33 AM, 20th May 2026, About 3 weeks ago
Reply to the comment left by howdidigethere at 20/05/2026 – 09:55
Well said, I agree 100%.
Sadly, most people are totally in the dark about the real direction of travel.
Member Since July 2013 - Comments: 476 - Articles: 1
11:33 AM, 20th May 2026, About 3 weeks ago
Excellent piece Mark, worth sending to all the sheeple you know
Member Since August 2014 - Comments: 176
10:00 AM, 24th May 2026, About 2 weeks ago
Reply to the comment left by howdidigethere at 20/05/2026 – 09:55
Exactly, the UKs housing has been “commoditised” as an international investment asset class, and control of the money supply is a big part of the picture.
Mark is correct in that BlackRock is not interested in buying our Victorian terraces, too much trouble and expense to maintain, but these properties hold millions of desirable top tier tenants who will be forced to move to possibly corporate BTR properties by pressuring the Independent Landlords into selling up those Victorian properties as I am now doing. My six Victorian terraces in Bristol are being sold and will force 24 middle class professionally employed 20 somethings to move somewhere else, possibly to a corporate BTR apartment.
It’s all controlled and manipulated, as per quotes from some well known early multi millionaires.
“I care not what puppet is placed upon the Throne of England to rule The Empire on which the sun never sets. The man that controls Britain’s money supply controls The British Empire, and I control the British money supply.” – Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild
“We will set up a money system that will shut them down forever, keeping them and their children in debt forever.”- John D Rockefeller.
Member Since July 2013 - Comments: 476 - Articles: 1
4:02 PM, 24th May 2026, About 2 weeks ago
Reply to the comment left by Bristol Landlord at 24/05/2026 – 10:00
Exactly this.