Three stories today, none of them about a wall or a roof, all of them about friction. A campaign group wants landlords fined for squeezing deposits. Estate agents say half of all sales now take seventeen weeks or more to reach exchange. And a tax aimed at Kensington mansions may be about to catch a good few Wealden farmhouses instead. Different markets, same lesson: the system is getting slower and more expensive to move through, whoever you are.
Generation Rent wants fines for exaggerated deposit claims
Campaign group Generation Rent delivered a 17,000-signature petition to the Secretary of State for Housing this week, as Property118 reports. It wants three changes: fines for landlords who repeatedly make deposit deduction claims that protection schemes go on to reject, a move to mandatory custodial protection so landlords no longer hold the money themselves, and the interest earned on the roughly £5.5 billion sitting in tenant deposits redirected to renters rather than kept by landlords. Generation Rent’s chief executive, Holly Williamson, argues that requiring custodial protection would force landlords to make any claim only after the tenancy ends, with unclaimed money returned to the tenant promptly rather than sat on. The group estimates around 300,000 renter households are losing out on meaningful sums every year as a result of the current arrangement.
From where I sit, the punitive half of this campaign is only half the answer. Every deposit dispute I have ever seen trace back to evidence, not intent — a landlord with a proper, dated, photographed check-in report rarely loses an adjudication, exaggerated claim or not, because the scheme adjudicator has something to measure the checkout condition against. Most of the disputed claims I hear about come from landlords with no professional inventory at all, working from memory and a mobile phone photo taken in bad light. Fining bad-faith claims after the fact treats a symptom; requiring a proper condition report at the start of every tenancy would stop most of these disputes from existing in the first place.
Landlords should commission an independent, dated inventory and schedule of condition at every check-in and check-out, not rely on their own notes, whatever the deposit scheme rules eventually say. Tenants moving into a property without one should take their own timestamped photographs on day one and keep them.
Half of house sales are taking seventeen weeks or more to reach exchange
Propertymark’s latest Housing Insight Report, covering July and reported by Today’s Conveyancer on 24 September, found 51.2 per cent of member agents now say most of their sales take 17 weeks or longer from offer acceptance to exchange — up sharply from 35.4 per cent in June and 40.4 per cent in May. That is a genuine reversal, not noise: this was a market that had been recovering on transaction speed only two months earlier. Propertymark chief executive Nathan Emerson called it “particularly concerning,” noting that “delays in the conveyancing process continue to create uncertainty” even while buyer numbers and new listings both grew over the same period.
The instinct is to blame conveyancers, and capacity is certainly part of it, but a good share of the slippage I see in my own instructions happens earlier than that: a survey commissioned only after an offer is accepted, which then surfaces a defect, a missing building control completion certificate, or an unrecorded extension, and sends everyone back to square one weeks into the transaction. A buyer with a full report at offer stage negotiates once, on full information; a buyer who surveys after acceptance negotiates twice, once on price and once on whatever the surveyor finds, and the second round is what stretches a straightforward sale into a four-month ordeal.
Anyone selling this autumn should get a survey or condition report done before the property goes on the market, not after an offer lands, so defects are priced in from day one rather than renegotiated mid-transaction. Buyers should budget on four months or more from offer to exchange as the realistic case, not the exception.
A £1.5m mansion tax would catch a lot more than Kensington
The confirmed policy, due from April 2028, is a High Value Council Tax Surcharge on English homes worth £2 million or more, adding £2,500 to £7,500 a year depending on value to roughly 165,000 households, according to Office for Budget Responsibility figures set out by the HomeOwners Alliance. Ahead of the 28 October Budget, reports say the Treasury is now weighing whether to lower that threshold to £1.5 million, which analysts at Tax Policy Associates estimate could pull in roughly 160,000 further properties and raise closer to £800 million a year rather than £400 million. Analysis for the Londoner, published 22 September, put the extra London impact alone at around 61,787 additional homes, concentrated in boroughs like Hammersmith and Fulham, Wandsworth and Kensington and Chelsea.
The number that should worry my clients is the one nobody in this coverage mentions: how many of those extra properties sit outside London altogether. A four-bedroom period farmhouse or a converted oast in the Weald, unremarkable by Sussex standards, can comfortably clear £1.5 million without anyone involved thinking of it as a mansion. And a value-based surcharge, unlike the fixed council tax bands it sits alongside, requires an actual individual valuation of every affected property — which is precisely the kind of exercise that generates disputes, appeals and demand for professional evidence when an owner thinks their home has been overvalued into the net.
Owners of higher-value rural and semi-rural property across Sussex, Surrey and Kent should get an independent valuation now, ahead of the Budget, so they know their actual exposure rather than finding out from a council tax demand. Anyone selling a property near either threshold this autumn should factor the surcharge risk into their timing, since a sale that completes before April 2028 sidesteps the charge entirely under the confirmed policy.
What I’d actually do
- Landlord taking a tenancy deposit? Commission an independent, dated inventory and schedule of condition at check-in and check-out, whatever the deposit scheme rules eventually require.
- Moving into a rental without a professional inventory? Take your own timestamped photographs on day one and keep them somewhere you can find them at the end of the tenancy.
- Selling a property this autumn? Commission a survey or condition report before you list, so any defects are priced into the asking price rather than renegotiated after an offer.
- Buying? Budget on four months or more from offer to exchange as the realistic timeline, not the exception.
- Own a higher-value home in Sussex, Surrey or Kent? Get an independent valuation now, ahead of the 28 October Budget, so you know your actual exposure if the threshold moves.
Whether it’s a pre-sale condition report or an independent valuation ahead of the Budget, the practice carries out independent Building Surveys 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 26 September 2026.