Four stories today, and none of them quite agree with each other, which is rather the point. A well-regarded charity says the private rented sector isn’t shrinking at all, a rental index published the same week says rents just hit a fresh record regardless, a tribunal fined a landlord £28,093 for trying to make a compliance letter disappear, and the letting agent industry’s own trade body has admitted two-thirds of its members have no formal qualification whatsoever. Read together, today is a day about who actually has the evidence and who is simply repeating a line that suits them.
The private rented sector isn’t vanishing — it’s consolidating into fewer, bigger hands
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation published new analysis this week arguing that claims of a mass landlord exodus don’t hold up, a finding reported by LandlordZone on Thursday. The number of privately rented homes passed five million for the first time in 2025, growing by roughly 45,000 homes a year since 2021, and the English Housing Survey put the number of private renting households at 4.7 million in 2024/25 — the highest on record. Landlord purchases exceeded landlord sales in June 2026 for the first time since 2019, and the average tenancy now runs 4.7 years, up from 3.5 years in 2013/14. JRF’s own reading is that this is “stagnation and consolidation” rather than shrinkage: individual accidental landlords with buy-to-let mortgages are genuinely leaving, but they’re being replaced by limited-company portfolio landlords and build-to-rent operators, not by nobody. The foundation is using the finding to argue for rent controls, quoted as saying they “would give [tenants] security and stability, and they should be implemented without delay.”
What I actually see on the ground matches the consolidation story better than either the “landlords are fleeing” headline or the “nothing to see here” one. The buyers I meet at buy-to-let survey instructions increasingly are portfolio landlords and small companies rather than first-time accidental landlords, and they complete faster because they don’t need a residential mortgage contingency. That matters for anyone selling a tenanted property: your buyer pool is shifting toward purchasers who know exactly what a survey will say before they’ve read it, and who negotiate on the numbers in the report rather than the emotion of it.
A smaller landlord weighing an exit shouldn’t assume the market has collapsed underneath them — total demand from professional buyers looks steady. But the longer average tenancy length changes the maintenance calculus: a property let for 4.7 years accumulates wear that a two-year turnover cycle never would, and a pre-sale condition survey is worth commissioning before a portfolio buyer’s own surveyor finds it for them.
Rents just hit a fresh record — read that “stable sector” headline with this in mind
HomeLet’s Rental Index for August 2026, drawn from over a million tenancy references a year across more than 5,000 UK letting agents, put the average new UK tenancy at £1,382 a month — up 0.9 per cent on July and 4.1 per cent on a year ago. Outside London the average is £1,179, up 3.4 per cent annually; inside London it’s £2,238, up 5.1 per cent. HomeLet’s affordability measure has tenants spending 32 per cent of income on rent nationally, rising to 39.8 per cent in London. Ten of the UK’s twelve regions posted month-on-month growth in August.
Put next to the JRF story, this is the half of the picture a “the sector isn’t shrinking” headline conveniently leaves out: home count and affordability are two different measurements, and a stable or even growing stock of rented homes says nothing about whether tenants can afford to live in them. For landlords, rising headline rent doesn’t automatically mean rising yield once financing, compliance and insurance costs are netted off — a point that matters more with every licensing fee and safety requirement added this year.
Anyone remortgaging a let property should use a current achieved-rent figure for the actual postcode, not an asking-rent listing or last year’s tenancy agreement, when presenting affordability to a lender — the gap between the two has been widening all year and lenders increasingly check.
A Tower Hamlets landlord tried to make the evidence disappear — it cost him £28,093
The First-tier Tribunal ordered David Martinez to pay four tenants £28,093 — 70 per cent of rent paid — after finding he ran an unlicensed HMO at a Trevelyon House maisonette on Morpeth Street from November 2023 to January 2025, in breach of Tower Hamlets’ additional licensing scheme, as LandlordZone reported on Thursday. The detail that pushed the award up wasn’t just the missing licence: when a tenant showed him a council letter about it, Martinez took it and told them it was “none of their business,” which the tribunal found was a deliberate attempt to stop tenants giving Tower Hamlets information in writing. A July 2024 inspection found no fire detection system or fire blanket, no carbon monoxide alarm, no bedroom smoke alarms, internal doors without fire-safety specification, and mould in tenants’ rooms.
The lesson here isn’t really about licensing — it’s about what tribunals punish hardest. Concealing the paper trail made this case worse than the underlying breach would have on its own; a landlord who’d simply been late renewing a licence and had reasonable fire precautions in place would not be looking at a £28,000 order. The fire-safety failure list itself is a fairly standard HMO checklist — interlinked detection, a carbon monoxide alarm near any combustion appliance, fire-rated internal doors — that a proper fire risk assessment catches before a single tenant moves in, not after an inspector does.
Anyone running an HMO, licensed or not, should commission an independent fire risk assessment now rather than waiting for a council inspection to find the gaps first. And never intercept post addressed to a tenant, however irritating the council’s letter — it turns an administrative breach into evidence of concealment, and tribunals notice the difference.
Two-thirds of letting agents have no qualification at all, and the industry is finally admitting it
The Lettings Industry Council surveyed 616 property professionals and found 65 per cent hold no formal property-related qualification, despite 62 per cent having more than fifteen years’ experience, LandlordZone reported on Thursday. Seventy per cent of respondents said they’d support mandatory qualifications and registration anyway. TLIC is using the finding to press government to revive the long-stalled Regulation of Property Agents agenda: mandatory Level 3 qualifications for anyone managing day-to-day agency work, firm-level licensing, continuing professional development, a statutory code of practice and a Professional Standards Board able to suspend or revoke licences. TLIC co-chair Theresa Wallace said the recommendations “can act as the basis of a more effective system of regulation moving forward.” The government’s home-buying and selling reform programme already includes a code of practice for property agents, with an estate-agent qualifications consultation pencilled in for 2027.
I sit on the RICS and RPSA side of a line that looks increasingly strange the longer this goes unaddressed: the person carrying out a £150 EPC has to hold an accredited qualification and submit to audit, while the person managing the letting of a £400,000 property can, and typically does, have no formal training at all. TLIC publishing its own 65 per cent figure is close to a confession that voluntary self-regulation hasn’t worked, which is exactly the evidence RoPA needed and never quite had enough of when momentum stalled after the Grenfell-era attention moved on to other things.
Landlords choosing or reviewing a letting agent should ask a direct question rarely asked: does the specific person managing my property — not the franchise brand on the shopfront — hold a recognised qualification such as an ARLA Propertymark technical award. TLIC’s own data says the honest answer is usually no, which makes it a genuine differentiator rather than box-ticking.
What I’d actually do
- Weighing whether to sell a tenanted property? Don’t assume the market has collapsed under you — professional buyer demand looks steady — but get a condition survey done before a portfolio buyer’s own surveyor finds the wear a longer tenancy has left behind.
- Remortgaging a let property? Use a current achieved-rent figure for your actual postcode, not an asking-rent listing, when you present affordability to a lender.
- Running an HMO, licensed or not? Commission an independent fire risk assessment now, and never intercept post addressed to a tenant — it turns an administrative breach into evidence of concealment.
- Choosing or reviewing a letting agent? Ask whether the individual managing your property holds a recognised qualification. Most, on the industry’s own figures, will not.
Whether it’s a landlord facing a licensing tribunal or a homeowner deciding whether a tenanted property is worth buying, the practice carries out Building Surveys and Buy to Let Surveys across the South East to put evidence behind the decision rather than a headline. Get in touch.
Small print. General commentary, not advice for your specific circumstances — regulations, schemes and deadlines change, and your property is not the average property. Sources linked were accurate when read on 19 September 2026.