Four stories today, and between them they capture a market pulling in two directions at once. Professional landlords are consolidating rather than fleeing, the industry responsible for the Building Safety Act’s next deadlines admits it isn’t ready for them, asking prices took a sharper July knock than usual, and the Treasury’s own numbers don’t look like a market that’s actually cooling. None of this will surprise regular readers, but the detail behind each one changes what you should actually do about it.
Landlords aren’t fleeing the market — the professional ones are doubling down on it
Handelsbanken’s Property Investor Report, reported by LandlordZone, polled 200 UK property investors and landlords, most managing between five and 15 properties. Sixty-three per cent have raised rents in response to higher costs, 59% have tightened tenant selection specifically because of the Renters’ Rights Act, and 41% have switched their tenant profile toward what the report calls “lower risk” tenants. One in five, 20%, has sold a property because of rising costs, and 19% have pulled a property out of the rental market altogether. Handelsbanken UK chief economist James Sproule doesn’t dress it up: “Higher standards and stronger tenant protections are intended to improve the rental sector over the long term. But they also come with real costs, and our research shows professional investors are already adapting their behaviour in response.”
What’s easy to miss in those exit figures is the other half of the same survey. Eighty-four per cent of these investors plan to grow their portfolios over the next year, 71% plan to invest specifically in build-to-rent, and 89% are already spending on energy efficiency measures — EV charging, smart meters, solar. That tracks with separate figures showing the UK build-to-rent sector attracted £2.2 billion of investment in the second quarter of 2026, the strongest Q2 on record. This isn’t landlords leaving the sector so much as the sector consolidating into fewer, better-capitalised, more professional hands.
My read: the individual landlord with one or two lets and no appetite for compliance paperwork is the one actually leaving, and the portfolio operator who can absorb the Renters’ Rights Act’s costs is the one buying the stock or building fresh instead. That 89% energy-efficiency figure is the real tell — it says the professional money already assumes EPC C will matter and is spending ahead of the 2030 deadline rather than waiting for the exemption rules to firm up. Retrofit and EPC work booked now, with no compliance clock running, tends to be cheaper and calmer than the same work booked against one.
The Building Safety Act’s next deadlines are closer than the industry has noticed
An open evening hosted by ABB Electrification, bringing together experts from the CIBSE Fire Safety Group, Skanska and the BCIA and reported by Specification Online, made a point worth repeating. The two big compliance dates under the amended Building Safety Act regulations, 24 March 2027 for general building work and 24 September 2027 for higher-risk buildings, are now roughly eight and fourteen months away, and awareness hasn’t caught up. ABB’s Nigel Thomas put it plainly: “the changes themselves aren’t particularly complex; what struck us is the sheer gap in awareness across industry.”
The substance matters more than the date. The Accountable Person for a higher-risk building carries personal legal responsibility for managing safety risk, with gross negligence exposing them to up to 15 years’ imprisonment. Principal Designers now need a far more complete design understanding before Gateway 2, effectively meaning RIBA Stage 4 has to be finished before construction starts rather than running alongside it. And the “golden thread” of digital evidence, covering design, procurement, installation and testing through to handover, has to be built as the project happens, because it cannot be assembled retrospectively once someone asks for it.
My read: that last point should worry building owners and managing agents more than the prison sentence does. I’m regularly asked to reconstruct a building’s history from whatever paperwork happens to have survived, and “we’ll pull the records together later” is precisely the habit the golden thread requirement exists to kill. If you’re an Accountable Person, or advising one, on anything that might turn out to be higher-risk, the honest test isn’t whether you’re compliant today — it’s whether you could hand over a complete, contemporaneous record if asked next month. Most buildings I see couldn’t.
Asking prices fall hardest in a decade for July — but it’s not the whole story
Rightmove’s July index puts the average asking price of a newly listed home at £372,359, down 1.0%, or £3,832, on the month — five times the usual seasonal dip for July, which averages 0.2% over the past ten years. Rightmove points to a genuinely unusual month: a heatwave that dented buyer attention through May, June and again in July, the World Cup, and a change of Prime Minister landing in the middle of it. London fell hardest among the regions, down 1.6%, with the North East close behind at 2.0%.
The figures underneath the headline tell a steadier story. The number of homes for sale is close to a 12-year high for this time of year, the average two-year fixed mortgage rate has eased slightly to 4.92% from last month’s 5.07%, even though it’s still well above February’s 4.25%, and — the figure that actually matters to a seller — 74% of homes that sold and completed this year did so without any reduction on the original asking price.
My read: don’t confuse a seasonal wobble with a change in market conditions. The 74% figure tells you the sellers taking reductions are the ones who guessed wrong at listing, in a market where buyers have more choice than they’ve had in over a decade and no reason to compromise on a property priced to test rather than priced to sell. A pre-marketing condition survey earns its fee here — it’s a lot cheaper to get the asking price right once than to chase a falling market down through successive reductions.
HMRC’s numbers don’t look like a market that’s cooling
HMRC’s latest receipts bulletin, updated 21 July, shows stamp tax receipts of £5.1 billion for April to June 2026, up £0.5 billion on the same quarter last year, with June alone bringing in £1.24 billion, up 16% on May and 17% on June 2025. Inheritance tax moved in the same direction: £2.3 billion collected across the quarter, up £96 million year on year, with June’s £871 million the highest monthly IHT total on record.
My read: neither figure squares easily with a market everyone agrees is subdued. Stamp duty holding up while transaction volumes stay soft points to price mix and the additional-dwelling surcharge doing the heavy lifting rather than genuine volume growth. Inheritance tax is simpler and gets less attention: the nil-rate band has been frozen for years while property values haven’t stood still, so more ordinary estates get pulled into scope every year without a single policy announcement being made. If you’re dealing with an estate, or thinking about gifting or downsizing to manage one, get a current valuation rather than assuming last decade’s rules of thumb still apply — the threshold hasn’t moved, but the house almost certainly has.
What I’d actually do
- Individual landlord weighing whether to sell up or hold? Read the 89% energy-efficiency investment figure from professional investors as a signal, not a curiosity — book an EPC and retrofit assessment ahead of any compliance deadline rather than against one.
- Accountable Person, or advising one, on a higher-risk building? Start building a genuine golden thread of documentation now; March and September 2027 are closer than they look, and the record can’t be reconstructed after the fact.
- Selling in the South East this summer? Don’t chase a falling asking price down in stages — commission a proper condition survey before you list, and price to sell once rather than testing the market and cutting later.
- Managing or expecting to inherit an estate that includes property? Get a current valuation rather than relying on an old one — frozen thresholds mean more estates are caught every year even where nothing else has changed.
- Portfolio landlord benchmarking your own plans? The build-to-rent money flowing into the sector, £2.2bn last quarter alone, is a fair proxy for where institutional confidence currently sits.
If any of today’s stories touch your own plans — an EPC ahead of a letting, or a building survey ahead of a sale, purchase or higher-risk building assessment — the practice offers building surveys and EPCs across the South East. 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 24 July 2026.