The UK’s private rental market is undergoing a significant contraction
Over the past three years, the sector has lost an estimated £79 billion in value, representing roughly 5.1% of the total rental housing market, as increasing taxation, higher borrowing costs and regulatory reforms push many landlords to exit.
Analysis produced for the housing market by the real estate consultancy Savills indicates that the private rented sector (PRS) is the only part of the housing market to have declined in value since early 2022. Over the same period, the broader UK residential property market actually gained around £336 billion, growing by approximately 3.8% overall.
The divergence highlights how policy shifts and financing pressures are reshaping the structure of the rental market.
Landlords exiting while investors restructure
Recent figures suggest a growing number of landlords are either selling properties or restructuring how they hold them.
Research from companies house shows that 66,587 landlords transferred properties into limited company structures during 2025, the highest number recorded.
This shift reflects an attempt by investors to manage rising tax liabilities. Corporate structures allow landlords to offset mortgage interest against rental income — a relief that has been significantly reduced for individuals in recent years. At the same time, enthusiasm for acquiring new buy-to-let properties has weakened. In 2015, landlords accounted for 15.8% of home purchases. By last year, that figure had dropped to 10.9%.
The decline is particularly visible in London, where property prices and financing costs are highest while rental yields remain relatively low. In the capital, landlord purchases have fallen from 16.4% of transactions to just 9.1%.
The end of the amateur landlord era?
Other data suggests the buy-to-let boom that began in the late 1990s is entering a new phase. Low interest rates and new mortgage products helped fuel rapid expansion in landlord investment after buy-to-let mortgages were first introduced in 1996. By the early 2000s, the sector was growing rapidly, reshaping the UK housing landscape.
Today, the market looks very different. Regulatory reforms, higher borrowing costs and increased operating expenses are forcing many smaller landlords to reconsider their position. Larger investors with professional portfolios appear better equipped to absorb those pressures. As a result, the rental market is gradually shifting from a landscape dominated by individual landlords and accidental investors toward one increasingly controlled by professional operators and corporate structures.
Policy changes have accelerated pressure
A sequence of policy interventions has steadily reduced the financial attractiveness of buy-to-let investment.
Key changes include, Additional stamp duty charges on second homes and investment properties, Restrictions on mortgage interest tax relief for individual landlords, Higher borrowing costs following interest rate rises since 2022, New tenant protections under the upcoming Renters’ Rights Act.
The legislation, expected to take effect later this year, will introduce open-ended tenancies and remove “no-fault” evictions, alongside potential financial penalties for non-compliance. Further tax adjustments announced by Chancellor Rachel Reeves will also increase the tax burden on income derived from property. For many smaller landlords, these changes have significantly altered the economics of the sector.
Andrew Stanton CEO Proptech-PR
Week 41: From One-Time CapEx to Continuous Value – DDI as a Platform, Not a Project
In this weekly series, we explore how the commercial real estate industry is being transformed by data and digital infrastructure. Guided by the principles in Peak Property Performance, we unpack a new idea every week to help owners unlock value, reduce risk, and future-proof their portfolios. Learn more about OpticWise and Bill Douglas, the authors of this series.
Most CRE technology investments start the same way:
A budget line.
A vendor proposal.
A one-time installation.
A ribbon cutting.
And then… stagnation.
The system works for a while. Maybe it delivers some early wins. But without integration, governance, and long-term ownership, it becomes just another static tool in a growing stack of disconnected systems.
This is the difference between treating Data & Digital Infrastructure (DDI) as a project versus treating it as a platform.
And that difference determines whether you create short-term improvement—or continuous value.
The Project Mindset (And Why It Fails)
When DDI is treated as a project, it typically looks like:
- Install access control this year
- Upgrade Wi-Fi next year
- Add sensors when the budget allows
- Layer on a dashboard later
- Data? What data?
Each initiative is isolated. Each has its own vendor. Each operates in its own environment.
The result?
- Fragmented systems
- Limited interoperability
- Redundant data
- Vendor lock-in
- Minimal compounding returns
You spend capital—but you don’t build momentum.
The Platform Mindset (And Why It Wins)
A platform mindset starts with data & digital infrastructure first.
Instead of asking, “What system should we install?” the question becomes:
“What digital foundation do we need to support everything we’ll want to do over the next 10 years?”
When DDI is treated as a platform:
- Connectivity is centralized and owner-controlled
- Systems are selected for interoperability
- Data flows into a normalized structure
- New applications plug into an existing backbone
- Insights compound over time
This is how buildings become adaptive assets—not static ones.
Andrew Stanton CEO Proptech-PR
‘The actual work, making smart procurement decisions, protecting the owner’s budget was buried under a mountain of emails and calls’ Rihards Trops CEO of TenderPro
Every property manager knows the feeling. You need to find a contractor, get three comparable quotes, coordinate site visits, chase offers that arrive in four different formats, build a manual spreadsheet to compare them, and somehow produce documentation that satisfies the building owner. All while managing a portfolio of properties, tenants, and a hundred other daily priorities.
This is how commercial real estate procurement works in 2026. Email threads. WhatsApp, voice messages. PDFs that don’t match. Excel files built from scratch every time. And at the end of it — a decision that’s difficult to justify, impossible to audit, and almost certainly more expensive than it needed to be. TenderPRO was built to change this.
The problem nobody has fixed
Rihards Trops Founder spent eight years inside the commercial real estate industry, first as a technical services contractor servicing office buildings and shopping centres, then as a property manager responsible for procurement across a portfolio of commercial properties. From both sides of the table, the picture was the same. Property managers were drowning in unstructured communication.
Contractors were submitting carefully prepared offers and hearing nothing back. Building owners were asking for documentation that didn’t exist. And significant amounts of money were being left on the table simply because running a proper competitive tender process took too long.
“I was managing inboxes, not properties,” says Trops. “The actual work, making smart procurement decisions, protecting the owner’s budget was buried under a mountain of emails and calls. Every property manager I knew operated this way. And nobody had fixed it.”
A single tender, managed the traditional way, can consume 30 or more hours of a property manager’s time. Multiply that across a portfolio handling dozens of procurement cycles per year, and the administrative burden becomes unsustainable. The inevitable result: shortcuts. Familiar suppliers get the work without competition.
Contracts auto-renew without market testing. When prices drift upward, there’s no competitive process to push back. Research consistently shows that commercial properties without structured competitive tendering overpay on service contracts by 15 to 25 percent annually. On a significant facilities management spend, that’s a material sum leaving the table every year — not through negligence, but through a broken process.
What TenderPRO does
Andrew Stanton CEO Proptech-PR
