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SUMMARY
Yes. London landlords really are selling up in unusually large numbers, especially owners of flats, but the evidence points to a selective restructuring of the market rather than an accelerating collapse of private renting.
The strongest selling pressure is concentrated in London. Hamptons found that 20.3% of London homes advertised for sale in June had been rented during the previous five years, more than twice the 9.5% figure in the South East.
The headline still overstates actual exits. More than half of the landlord properties Hamptons tracked when they were listed for sale in 2025 failed to sell, and the failure rate for flats reached 60%.
London's problem is less about landlords abandoning property altogether than about where they want their capital. Investor buying has surged in northern England, while London and the wider South have barely moved, and even London-based landlords are increasingly buying farther north.
The yield gap is doing a lot of the work. Paragon's Greater London gross yield was 5.74%, the lowest regional figure in its data, while Wales, the North East and North West were all close to or above 8%.
Flats are the weak spot. They combine falling prices, slow sales, service charges and leasehold-specific costs with relatively modest yields, which makes a marginal London buy-to-let look much harder to justify than it did when capital growth was strong.
Small landlords appear to be under the most pressure. Larger owners can spread compliance and management costs across portfolios, while someone with one heavily mortgaged flat has much less room for refinancing shocks, repairs or regulatory change.
The Renters' Rights Act accelerated some sales, but it did not create the underlying problem. Higher financing costs, the mortgage-interest tax restriction, the five-percentage-point additional-property SDLT surcharge and weak London capital growth were already squeezing returns.
The rental market does not look like one suffering a sudden supply collapse. London rents remain extremely high, but annual growth is only 3.0%, and official survey data have not yet shown a statistically convincing fall in the private rented dwelling stock.
The sharpest burst of selling also appears to have cooled. Landlord listings fell after the Renters' Rights Act took effect, buy-to-let arrears are low, new lending is growing, and financing conditions have improved slightly.
The clearest way to read the market is that weaker London buy-to-lets are being shaken out one property at a time. Some homes move into owner-occupation, some are bought by other landlords, and some owners simply fail to sell and stay put.
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Why are people suddenly saying London landlords are selling up?
London landlords really are selling more rental homes than landlords in most other parts of the country, and the scale is large enough to take seriously.
Hamptons' analysis of Connells Group listings found that 20.3% of London homes advertised for sale in June had been rented at some point during the previous five years. That means roughly one property in five coming onto London's sales market had a recent rental history. The equivalent figure was only 9.5% in the South East.
Several pressures have arrived on top of each other. Mortgage rates jumped after 2022, the additional-property Stamp Duty surcharge rose from three to five percentage points, London property prices have been weak, and the Renters' Rights Act changed tenancy and possession rules this year. The economics were already getting worse before the new legislation arrived.
There was also a rush to sell before the Renters' Rights Act took effect. Hamptons subsequently recorded fewer landlord listings, which suggests some landlords simply brought forward a decision they were already considering.
| Pressure on London landlords | What has changed | Why it hurts in London | Likely effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mortgage costs | Borrowing remains far more expensive than before 2022 | London mortgages are unusually large | Leveraged landlords have much thinner cash flow |
| Additional-property SDLT | Surcharge rose to 5 percentage points | Expensive homes create very large tax bills | Buying a replacement property is less attractive |
| Renters' Rights Act | Tenancy and possession rules changed | London has a huge private rental sector | Some landlords accelerated planned sales |
| London prices | Prices have recently fallen | Capital growth used to compensate for modest yields | Holding weak properties makes less sense |
| Service charges | Many flat owners face rising annual bills | London landlords own large numbers of leasehold flats | Net rental income gets squeezed |
Are London landlords selling much more than landlords elsewhere?
Yes. London currently stands out as the strongest landlord-selling market in England.
The difference is large. Hamptons found that 20.3% of London properties listed for sale in June had been rented during the previous five years, compared with 9.5% in the South East and 9.2% across Great Britain.
The yield gap helps explain why. Paragon Bank's first-quarter mortgage-book data put the average gross yield in Greater London at 5.74%, the lowest of any region it measured. Wales reached 8.74%, the North East 8.10% and the North West 7.87%.
On £200,000 of property, a three-percentage-point yield advantage is worth about £6,000 of extra gross rent each year. London landlords frequently have much more than £200,000 tied up in a single property, so the opportunity cost can become substantial.
The divide is now visible in actual purchases. Landlords have become far more active across northern England while investment across London and southern England has barely moved.
| Market | Recent landlord-selling or buying indicator | Typical yield signal | What we see |
|---|---|---|---|
| London | 20.3% of June sale listings had been rented | 5.74% in Paragon data | Heavy selling pressure |
| South East | 9.5% of June listings had been rented | 6.40% | Much less selling than London |
| North East | Landlords made up 23.8% of buyers Jan-Apr | 8.10% | Strong investor demand |
| North West | Landlords made up 25.3% of buyers Jan-Apr | 7.87% | Buy-to-let activity has surged |
Get fresh and reliable data on the London property market
Towers sold off plan to overseas buyers have been reselling below what the first owners paid for a decade now. Where asking prices sit furthest from what flats actually earn and resell for.
Does “one in five London homes for sale was rented” mean landlords are fleeing London?
No. One in five is a striking London landlord-sales figure, although it measures homes offered for sale rather than completed landlord exits.
That difference is huge. Hamptons looked at rental properties landlords listed for sale during 2025 and found that 51% failed to sell. For flats, the failure rate reached 60%.
A landlord can therefore appear in the “selling up” statistics and still own exactly the same rental property a year later.
There is another complication. Hamptons defines a previously rented property as one that had been let during the preceding five years. Some homes had already stopped being rentals before the latest sales listing, and others are eventually bought by another landlord.
So the 20.3% figure tells us something important: former rental properties are unusually common on London's sales market today. It cannot tell us that one-fifth of London's rental stock is leaving the sector. A lot of the headlines skip that distinction.
Are landlords still buying in London, or has the money moved north?
London still has landlord buyers, although most of the current buy-to-let revival is happening elsewhere.
Between January and April, landlords accounted for 9.1% of purchases across London, the South East, South West and East of England, according to Hamptons. A year earlier the figure was 8.8%, so southern investment barely changed.
Northern England moved completely differently. Landlords reached 23.9% of purchases across the North East, North West and Yorkshire and the Humber, up from 14.5% a year earlier. In the North West, they represented 25.3% of all buyers.
The geographical shift becomes even clearer when we look at London-based investors themselves. Hamptons found earlier this year that 18% of London-based landlords buying property were purchasing in one of the three northern regions, more than triple the 5% share a decade ago.
The yield maths explains a lot of it. Hamptons calculated that the same amount invested in the North East could produce roughly 62% more gross annual rental income than in London. These days, plenty of London landlords still want property exposure; they simply do not insist that the property has to be in London.
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Are London rental homes disappearing when landlords sell them?
Some London rental homes are disappearing, although a surprisingly large number are simply changing landlord.
Hamptons found that 23% of properties bought by landlords across Great Britain between January and April had already been rented by the previous owner. That was up from 16% in 2025 and only 9.9% on average between 2019 and 2023.
The London figure was lower at 16.8%, which tells us something useful. Rental properties sold in London are more likely to cross into owner-occupation than similar properties in higher-yielding northern markets.
This is one of the biggest changes in the market. Landlord-to-landlord transactions have become common enough to account for almost a quarter of current investor acquisitions nationally. Bigger or better-capitalised owners are often buying properties from landlords who no longer want them.
A landlord sale therefore needs a second question attached to it: who bought the property? Without that answer, we cannot know whether London's rental stock actually fell.
What kind of London property are landlords selling most?
London flats are taking most of the pressure, and they are currently much more vulnerable than houses.
Across Great Britain, 24.4% of flats listed for sale in Hamptons' June dataset had previously been rented. The figure for houses was only 7.8%. Flats also accounted for 51% of the rental properties landlords attempted to sell during 2025.
London magnifies that pattern because flats make up such a large part of its rental market. The latest Land Registry figures show an average London flat or maisonette worth about £431,000, down 4.7% over the previous year. The average London home fell 2.5%, terraced houses were almost flat at -0.3%, and semi-detached homes actually gained 0.6%.
Liquidity is poor as well. Hamptons found that flats took around 85 days to go under offer, compared with 59 days for houses, and 60% of landlord-owned flats listed during 2025 failed to sell.
Then there are the costs that sit specifically around leasehold ownership. Service charges, major works, building-safety problems in some developments and lease issues can eat into rental income while also making resale harder.
A £431,000 flat falling in value while producing a modest yield and generating several thousand pounds of annual service charges is exactly the kind of asset an older buy-to-let investor starts questioning.
| London property signal | Flats | Houses / other property | What it tells us |
|---|---|---|---|
| Former rentals among sale listings nationally | 24.4% | 7.8% for houses | Landlord selling is heavily concentrated in flats |
| Failed landlord sales in 2025 | 60% for flats | Lower overall | Flats are difficult to exit |
| London annual price move | -4.7% | Terraced -0.3%; semi-detached +0.6% | Flats are underperforming |
| Time to go under offer | About 85 days | About 59 days for houses | Flat liquidity is weaker |
The areas and new build projects in London that are most overpriced
Towers sold off plan to overseas buyers have been reselling below what the first owners paid for a decade now. Where asking prices sit furthest from what flats actually earn and resell for.
Are small London landlords the ones giving up?
Yes, smaller landlords look much more vulnerable than professional portfolio owners right now.
The latest NRLA Landlord Eye research found that 26% of responding landlords had sold or were selling at least part of their portfolio because of the Renters' Rights Act, while another 19% were considering it. Among landlords with a single property, more than 60% said they were unsure whether they would still be landlords by the end of next year.
We should treat that survey for what it is: a poll of NRLA members across England and Wales, rather than a census of London landlords. The split by portfolio size still fits the wider transaction data very well.
Hamptons is increasingly seeing larger landlords acquire properties from smaller landlords. At the same time, incorporation has become much more common. Around 680,000 rental homes in England and Wales were already held through limited companies by early 2025, according to Hamptons, and London accounted for about 30% of those buy-to-let companies.
The economics favour scale. A portfolio landlord can spread accountancy, management and compliance costs across many homes and may have more financing options. Someone with one heavily mortgaged London flat has far less room for error.
So when we talk about landlords “leaving London”, we are often talking about a change in who owns rental housing as much as a fall in the number of rental homes.
Is London buy-to-let still worth it today?
London buy-to-let can still make money, but average returns are weak enough that investors now need a genuinely good property rather than simply a London postcode.
Paragon's first-quarter lending data put Greater London's gross rental yield at 5.74%, the lowest regional figure in its mortgage book. Compare that with 8.74% in Wales, 8.10% in the North East and 7.87% in the North West.
Gross yield also gives landlords the nicest possible version of the calculation. Mortgage interest, repairs, insurance, letting fees, empty periods, service charges and tax all come afterwards.
Capital growth used to make this trade-off easier. A landlord could accept a modest annual rental return while the property gained substantial value. That has become much harder to rely on. The latest Land Registry data put London's average home at £554,000, down 2.5% over a year, with flats down almost twice as much.
The same £198,550 of capital could generate roughly £18,400 of gross annual rent in the North East according to a recent Hamptons comparison, around £7,000 more than the same amount invested at London's typical yield.
That gap is large enough to change where investors shop.
| Economic factor | Current reading | What it means for London buy-to-let |
|---|---|---|
| Greater London gross yield | 5.74% in Paragon Q1 data | Lowest regional yield |
| New UK BTL mortgage rate | 4.71% average in Q1 | Financing still consumes a large share of gross return |
| Average London home | £554,000 | Very high amount of capital needed |
| London annual price move | -2.5% | Little recent help from capital appreciation |
| London flat annual move | -4.7% | Particularly difficult for flat landlords |
Where sellers in London are cutting their prices the most
Prime central has been discounting quietly for years while parts of the outer zones have not moved at all. Which areas are cutting the most, by how much, and how long they held out first.
Did higher mortgage rates break London buy-to-let?
Higher mortgage rates badly damaged the numbers for leveraged London landlords, though the latest lending data show the pressure is now easing.
UK Finance says the average rate on newly advanced buy-to-let mortgages was 4.71% in the first quarter. That was 29 basis points below the same period a year earlier, so financing has become slightly less painful.
The comparison with the pre-2022 market remains brutal. A landlord refinancing £300,000 from 2% to 5% faces roughly £9,000 more interest a year before considering any repayment structure or tax effects.
London has unusually large mortgages, which makes the same percentage-rate increase far more expensive in pounds than it would be on a cheaper property elsewhere.
Individual landlords also face the residential finance-cost tax restriction introduced progressively from 2017. Mortgage interest can no longer simply be deducted from rental income in the old way for Income Tax purposes.
Yet the freshest UK Finance numbers strongly argue against a wave of forced selling. Buy-to-let arrears above 2.5% fell to 8,960 loans in the first quarter, down 560 in three months. Only 0.47% of buy-to-let mortgages were in arrears, while possessions remained at 810, unchanged from a year earlier and well below long-term norms.
London landlords are therefore selling mainly because they no longer like the return or the hassle, rather than because banks are repossessing rental homes in huge numbers.
Have taxes done more damage to London landlords than the Renters' Rights Act?
Yes. The long squeeze on London landlords started with tax changes years before the Renters' Rights Act arrived.
The mortgage-interest tax changes began to take effect from 2017. The additional-property Stamp Duty surcharge arrived even earlier and was later increased from three to five percentage points.
Those rules bite especially hard in London because prices are so high. Under today's SDLT system, somebody buying an additional £500,000 property in England faces a bill running into tens of thousands of pounds before furnishing, repairs, legal costs or mortgage fees.
That makes switching properties expensive too. A landlord may know that one flat is a poor investment and still hesitate to sell it because buying the replacement creates another large stamp-duty bill.
Capital Gains Tax adds another cost when landlords leave. Individual gains on residential property can currently face rates of 18% or 24%, depending on the seller's tax position, while the annual CGT allowance is only £3,000.
The Renters' Rights Act has certainly pushed some owners toward the exit, according to the latest NRLA survey. But London's underlying problem is older: tax, financing and weak yields had already changed the economics of buy-to-let.
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Did the Renters' Rights Act cause London landlords to rush for the exit?
The Renters' Rights Act accelerated some London landlord sales, and the rush appears to have been concentrated around its introduction.
Hamptons recorded landlords bringing properties to market before the new system began and fewer doing so afterwards. That timing strongly suggests that owners who already wanted to leave brought their sales forward.
The Act abolished Section 21 no-fault evictions and moved assured tenancies onto the new periodic framework. Landlords who genuinely intend to sell can still seek possession through the relevant ground.
One detail now makes casual attempts to sell much riskier. After using the sale ground to recover possession, the landlord faces a 12-month restriction before the property can simply be offered for rent again.
Combine that with Hamptons' finding that 51% of landlord properties listed in 2025 failed to sell and the downside becomes obvious. A landlord who removes a tenant, tests the sales market and fails to find a buyer has fewer easy escape routes.
That may explain why selling slowed after the rules arrived. The landlords who were determined to leave had an incentive to move early, while landlords staying today need to be more certain before putting a tenanted property up for sale.
Are falling London house prices making landlords sell?
Yes. Weak London property prices have removed one of the biggest reasons landlords previously accepted mediocre rental yields.
Land Registry data currently put the average London home at around £554,000, 2.5% lower than a year earlier. Flats and maisonettes fell 4.7% to around £431,000.
For many long-term landlords, rent was only half the investment case. London property produced enormous capital gains during earlier decades, so a 4% or 5% rental yield could still look attractive once rising property values were included.
That assumption has become much shakier. A landlord holding a £450,000 flat can collect more rent than a landlord elsewhere while still receiving a poorer return on the amount of capital tied up in the property.
Falling prices do eventually improve yields for new buyers, so this pressure has a natural limit. The pain falls first on existing owners watching their capital value weaken; the lower purchase price can make the same property more interesting to whoever comes next.
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Is London's private rental sector actually shrinking?
London's rental sector may be shrinking gradually, but the official evidence still does not show the dramatic collapse suggested by some landlord-exodus headlines.
The English Housing Survey estimated that around 28% of London households were privately renting in 2024-25, apparently down from 32% in the previous survey year. In absolute terms, that looked like a move from roughly 1.2 million privately renting households to around 1.1 million.
The government explicitly says that change was not statistically significant. The survey also failed to find a statistically significant fall in the share of London dwellings belonging to the private rented sector.
The longer national picture is more revealing. England has roughly 4.7 million to 4.8 million privately renting households today, and the sector's share has hovered around one-fifth of households for more than a decade.
During that period, England added millions of homes. Rental supply has therefore failed to keep pace with the wider housing stock even without a sudden numerical collapse.
For London, that slower structural squeeze fits the evidence much better than the idea that rental homes are vanishing overnight.
If London landlords are selling, why aren't rents rising much faster?
London rents are still extremely high, but current rent growth is surprisingly mild for a city supposedly experiencing a landlord exodus.
The latest ONS data put average London private rent at £2,317 a month, the highest of any English region. Annual growth was 3.0%.
That rate has recently picked up from 2.0% in May and 2.2% in June, so the market has stopped cooling quite as quickly. Even so, London is nowhere close to the double-digit rental inflation seen during the post-pandemic squeeze.
The explanation is that rents depend on what tenants can pay as well as how many landlords exist. London households already face the highest rents in Britain, so affordability increasingly limits further increases.
New-let data have also been softer than whole-market ONS rents at points this year. Hamptons recorded falling London new-let rents for five consecutive months earlier in 2026, including a 1.4% annual decline in April. Its May data then showed modest growth nationally, with the London market still subdued.
The rental market gives us another reason to avoid calling this a full-scale supply collapse. If London were suddenly losing rental homes on the scale implied by the most dramatic headlines, we would expect much more obvious pressure in current asking rents and newly agreed rents.
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Do landlord sales make it easier for London first-time buyers?
Yes, some London landlord sales are creating genuine opportunities for first-time buyers, particularly in the flat market.
Hamptons found that former rental homes sold in southern England are much more likely to be bought by first-time buyers or owner-occupiers than those sold in northern England.
The property types line up as well. London's average flat was around £431,000 in the latest Land Registry figures, while the average London home bought by a first-time buyer was about £472,000. Former buy-to-let flats therefore sit unusually close to the part of London's market where first-time buyers are active.
Weak flat prices help further. London flats were down 4.7% year on year in the latest official data, creating more negotiating room than buyers are getting on many houses.
There is still a trade-off for the city. When a tenant buys a former rental, the home remains occupied and home ownership increases. When somebody who was living with parents buys the same flat, the owner-occupied stock gains one home while the rental stock loses one.
Either way, the sale does nothing to increase London's total housing supply. It simply changes who owns an existing home.
Are upcoming energy rules going to make more London landlords sell?
Energy-efficiency rules will probably push some borderline London landlords toward selling, although they look like a secondary pressure compared with tax, financing and weak returns.
Government policy requires privately rented homes to meet the new EPC C-equivalent standard by 2030, subject to exemptions and the final implementation rules. The planned spending cap is £10,000 per property.
For a landlord earning a strong yield, a one-off upgrade is manageable. It looks much worse for somebody with an older London flat already dealing with service charges, expensive refinancing and limited capital growth.
The timing also matters. Owners close to retirement now have to decide whether they want to spend thousands of pounds preparing a property for another decade of letting.
That means EPC requirements are likely to influence who exits over the next few years. They are unlikely to explain the bulk of the sales we are already seeing today.
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The pack also covers what a short lease will cost you to fix, and why an accepted offer here means nothing until exchange.
Has the London landlord sell-off already peaked?
The sharpest burst of London landlord selling probably has peaked for now.
Hamptons' latest post-Renters' Rights Act analysis found the share of formerly rented homes appearing on the British sales market falling from 11.3% a year earlier to 9.2% in June. Every region recorded a decline.
London remains the country's clear hotspot, so nobody should read that as the end of landlord selling. The direction has simply changed: exits are cooling instead of accelerating.
Financing has improved at the same time. UK Finance recorded 58,272 new buy-to-let loans in the first quarter, 3.3% more than a year earlier, with lending value up 7.0%. Average new-loan interest rates fell to 4.71%, and the average interest-cover ratio improved from 204% to 221%.
The latest NRLA survey still shows very poor landlord confidence, particularly among one-property owners, so another wave of disposals is entirely possible as further regulation arrives.
As of now, however, the transaction and mortgage data point toward a market settling after a concentrated period of exits rather than one entering a faster downward spiral.
Could London landlords start buying again if prices keep falling?
Yes. Cheaper London property would eventually pull some landlords back because falling purchase prices automatically improve rental yields when rents hold up.
We can already see how quickly investors respond when the numbers work. Across Great Britain, landlords accounted for 13.3% of purchases between January and April, the highest share since 2016. A record 23% of buy-to-let purchases this year have achieved double-digit gross yields, according to Hamptons, up from 17% in 2024 and just 9% in 2016.
London is currently missing most of that rebound because its yields remain weak. Paragon's 5.74% Greater London figure sits around three percentage points below the best-performing regions.
Another fall in London flat prices would close part of that gap. Lower mortgage rates would help too. Rent growth could improve the calculation from the other side.
So there is a price at which investors return. The interesting question is how far London property values, financing costs or rents have to move before that price becomes attractive again.
The areas and new build projects in London that are most overpriced
Towers sold off plan to overseas buyers have been reselling below what the first owners paid for a decade now. Where asking prices sit furthest from what flats actually earn and resell for.
Are London landlords really selling up?
Yes. London landlords really are selling up in unusually large numbers, especially owners of flats, although the evidence points to a selective restructuring of the market rather than an accelerating collapse of private renting.
The clearest evidence is the composition of London's sales market. One in five homes listed for sale in Hamptons' June data had been rented during the previous five years, more than twice the rate in the South East. London also combines the lowest regional gross yield in Paragon's latest figures with falling property values, expensive mortgages, high transaction taxes and heavy exposure to leasehold flats.
The landlords most vulnerable to that combination are increasingly easy to identify: small owners, leveraged investors and people holding expensive flats with weak yields or high service charges. The latest NRLA research shows particularly high uncertainty among one-property landlords.
At the same time, several pieces of evidence rule out the more dramatic version of the story. More than half of the landlord properties Hamptons tracked when they were listed in 2025 never sold. Some rental homes are bought by another landlord. Official survey data have yet to record a statistically convincing collapse in London's private rental dwelling stock. Buy-to-let arrears are falling, new lending is growing and the rush of landlord listings has recently cooled.
The biggest structural change is happening inside the landlord population. Capital is moving away from marginal London buy-to-lets toward larger portfolios, corporate structures and higher-yielding parts of Britain. Even London-based landlords are increasingly looking north.
So the answer today is clear: London has a real landlord sell-off, and it is more severe than elsewhere in England. What London does not currently have is evidence of landlords abandoning the city at an ever-faster pace. The weaker part of its buy-to-let market is being squeezed out, one low-return property at a time.
OUR METHODOLOGY
We approached “London landlords are selling up” as a market hypothesis to test rather than a headline to prove. The analysis separates homes being brought to market from completed landlord exits, changes in rental stock, landlord purchases, investment returns, financing pressure, property-type performance, regulation and rental-market conditions.
For each part of the question, we used the freshest available measure that captured it most directly. Listing data were treated as evidence of attempted sales, not automatic proof that a landlord had left the sector. We then checked what happened farther along the chain: whether properties sold, whether another landlord bought them, whether the rental stock changed and whether rents showed signs of a sudden supply squeeze.
Regional comparisons were used to show whether the pressure was specifically strong in London, while comparisons between flats and houses helped identify where exits were concentrated. Yield comparisons were kept separate from financing, tax, service charges and other ownership costs rather than being presented as a single assumed net return.
Timing was also important. We compared landlord behaviour with the sequence of tax changes, higher borrowing costs and the Renters' Rights Act so that a long-running deterioration in buy-to-let economics was not automatically attributed to the newest regulation. Forward-looking energy-efficiency rules were included only as a possible future pressure, not as an explanation for sales that had already happened.
We gave the most weight to Hamptons' listing and investor-purchase analysis, Paragon Bank's buy-to-let yield data, UK Finance's lending and arrears statistics, the UK House Price Index, ONS rental data and the English Housing Survey. HMRC guidance was used for SDLT, mortgage-interest tax treatment and Capital Gains Tax, while government and legislation sources were used for the Renters' Rights Act and the planned private-rental energy-efficiency rules.
The NRLA Landlord Eye survey was used differently. It is useful evidence on landlord sentiment and intentions, including the pressure on one-property landlords, but it is a membership survey across England and Wales rather than a direct measure of how many London landlords actually completed a sale.
Most importantly, no single statistic determines the conclusion. The final judgment comes from looking across sales listings, failed sales, landlord-to-landlord purchases, regional buying patterns, yields, prices, mortgage rates, arrears, rents and the measured size of the private rented sector, then asking whether those independent measures tell the same story.
Key sources used for this analysis include: Hamptons on landlord sales after the Renters' Rights Act, Hamptons on landlords buying from other landlords, Hamptons on investors moving north, Hamptons' Summer 2026 Market Insight, Paragon Bank on Q1 2026 buy-to-let yields, UK Finance on buy-to-let lending, the UK House Price Index for June 2026, ONS private rent and house-price data, the English Housing Survey 2024-25, HMRC's additional-property SDLT guidance, HMRC's residential landlord finance-cost guidance, HMRC's Capital Gains Tax guidance, the government's Renters' Rights Act overview, the Renters' Rights Act 2025 explanatory notes, the government's private-rental energy-efficiency policy, and NRLA Landlord Eye research.
Where sellers in London are cutting their prices the most
Prime central has been discounting quietly for years while parts of the outer zones have not moved at all. Which areas are cutting the most, by how much, and how long they held out first.
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