New mortgage data shows solo buyers rather than couples are a big trend
Buying alone is it a thing?
By Author Andrew Stanton CEO Proptech-PR
Figures show that solo buyers accounted for 36.9% of Barclaysโ mortgage completions in June 2026, as more people chose to step onto the property ladder without a partner beside them.
Choosing independence over waiting for a joint purchase has doubled over the last 50+ years, with solo first-time buyers doubling from 15% before 1980 to 30% since 2020.
Julie Hicks, Head of Communications at Hopkins Homes, said: โWeโre speaking to more people who have made a choice to buy on their own. It changes the conversation we have with them from day one, because everything from the mortgage to the running costs rests on one income rather than two.โ
Here, experts at Hopkins Homes, a new build developer, look at what solo buyers should consider before making an offer, from budgeting for the full mortgage and running costs alone to choosing a property that still works if circumstances change.
Budgeting Without a Second Income to Fall Back On
A joint mortgage application can spread the weight of a purchase across two salaries, but a solo buyer carries the full sum alone. Most UK lenders work within a standard income multiple of between four and 4.5 times annual salary when assessing how much someone can borrow. This places a firm ceiling on what a single applicant can realistically offer for a property, before other factors such as deposit size and outgoings are taken into account.
Hicks said: โThe starting point for anyone buying alone should be a proper conversation with a mortgage adviser. Knowing the real number you can borrow, rather than what youโd like to borrow, saves a lot of disappointment further down the line and means youโre only looking at homes you can genuinely afford to run as well as buy.โ
A Safety Net Matters More When Thereโs Only One Income
Homeownership brings a list of costs that sit outside the mortgage itself, from buildings insurance and maintenance to unexpected repairs.
A joint household has two incomes to absorb a gap if one falls away, however a solo buyer doesnโt have that cushion. Thatโs why itโs recommended to have three to six months of essential expenses set aside before and after a purchase completes.
Hicks said: โBuyers who are going it alone need to be disciplined about building a safety net because there isnโt a second income to lean on if something goes wrong. Weโd always encourage solo buyers to keep some savings back rather than putting every penny towards the deposit.โ
Andrew Stanton CEO Proptech-PR
If Zoopla is for sale, then so are you
Property portals are โbuilt to mine youโ
Thought leadership by Olivier Jauniaux Founder of NestLink
On 14 August, Providence Equity Partners announced it had agreed to acquire Hometrack from ZPG. Bloomberg confirmed the seller the same day. Terms were not disclosed, though Real Deals, citing a source close to the deal, put the valuation at around ยฃ600m.
If that passed you by, you are in excellent company. Hometrack has no television campaign, no app on anyoneโs home screen and no opinion on whether your extension added value. It tells mortgage lenders what houses are worth, for 16 of the top 20 in the UK and, by its own account, all of the top 14 in the Netherlands.
Three weeks later, on 8 September, Zoopla published its 2025 accounts under a headline announcing that it had doubled its homeowner audience to over six million and returned to profitability. Those six million people are not customers in any sense that involves money. They have volunteered their address, confirmed they own the place, and asked to be told what it is worth.
They are the inventory.
Put the two announcements side by side and the shape of this industry becomes embarrassingly clear. The business that explains property to lenders has a named buyer and a reported price. The business that explains property to the public is still sitting in the window with a rumour attached to it. Same underlying facts. One of them got paid.
Nobody has actually announced anything about Zoopla
This needs saying plainly because the industry repeats the Zoopla sale as though someone confirmed it. Nobody has.
City AM claimed in April 2025 that Silver Lake had put a ยฃ500m tag on the portal, with no named source, traced back to a podcast. Sky News reported in September 2025 that JP Morgan and Arma Partners had been engaged to review options for ZPG, with a series of separate sale processes seen as the likeliest outcome. Zooplaโs only on-record position, then and now, is that the ZPG board regularly engages specialist advisers and that, for Zoopla, it is business as usual.
Every article about this says Silver Lake paid ยฃ2.2bn in 2018, so ยฃ500m is a catastrophe. That is not a comparison, it is a category error. The 2018 deal bought ZPG whole, including Uswitch, which was doing a great deal of the heavy lifting at the time. Uswitch and the comparison brands went into RVU with Red Ventures, Confused.com was bolted on in 2020, Alto was spun out last year, and Hometrack has now gone to Providence. Nobody outside Silver Lake knows what Zoopla alone was implicitly bought for, so nobody can tell you what has been lost or gained on it.
What is left in the Silver Lake shop window is the Zoopla portal, Alto CRM, and PrimeLocation. Revenue of ยฃ83.2m for 2025, down 1.1% on the year and down from ยฃ90.4m in 2023. Profit of ยฃ20.7m at a 16% margin, achieved substantially by taking staff headcount down from 483 to 388.
Q1 2026 revenue up 9%. Hold the rumoured ยฃ500m against that and a buyer is paying around six times sales and 24 times profit for a business with a shrinking top line. Either the number is wrong, which is perfectly possible given where it came from, or the future buyer is paying for something that is not the portal.
They Are Buying You
Zoopla has been admirably direct about this. It now describes itself as shifting from property portal to data-driven homeowner platform and has said publicly that pushing as many leads as possible irrespective of outcome is no longer the strategy.
Read that from the buyerโs chair. The chief executive of the countryโs second largest portal is explaining that the portal is not the thing on sale. The audience is.
Divide the rumoured ยฃ500m by six million homeowners and you get roughly ยฃ80 a head for the real data on โintention to moveโ.
Somewhere in an investment data room there is a slide explaining that a homeowner who checks their value every few weeks is a seller who has not instructed yet, a remortgage that has not happened yet, and a buyer who has not started searching yet, all behind a single login, a registered address and contact info. That is the asset.
Andrew Stanton CEO Proptech-PR
How OpticWise help CRE property owners take control of their digital assets
Who controls the infrastructure, data and intelligence that runs inside commercial buildings?
By Author Andrew Stanton CEO Proptech-PR
Commercial real estate owners have invested heavily in technology to improve building operations, connect tenants and monitor performance. Yet behind the growing number of systems lies a problem that is becoming increasingly important: who actually controls the infrastructure, data and intelligence generated by those buildings?
For OpticWise, a US-based company specialising in commercial real estate digital infrastructure, the answer should be the property owner.
The business helps owners design, implement and operate the digital foundations that connect building systems, technology providers and operational data. Its objective is to give owners greater control over their assets, reduce the burden on property teams and create a foundation for better decision-making, including the use of artificial intelligence.
Rather than selling another application or dashboard, OpticWise focuses on the infrastructure beneath the software. Its proposition is that property owners should retain control of their data, credentials, documentation and ability to change suppliers without having to rebuild their buildingsโ technology from scratch.
The problem with fragmented building technology
Modern commercial properties rely on an increasingly complex collection of systems. Building management, access control, security, connectivity, energy monitoring, parking and tenant experience platforms may all be supplied and maintained by different vendors.
Each system can serve a useful purpose, but problems emerge when the technologies operate independently, information is difficult to share and responsibility for maintaining the connections between them becomes unclear.
Andrew Stanton CEO Proptech-PR
