I have been working in the property market here in Edgware since 1994, both residential and commercial, both sales and lettings.
I have seen recessions, crashes, booms, stamp duty hikes, stamp duty holidays, first-time buyer incentives, and every other flavour of government intervention in the three decades since.
I have watched this market absorb a great deal. But I will be honest with you: what is happening right now genuinely concerns me.
This Friday, the Renters’ Rights Act comes into force. It is, we are told, the most significant shake-up of the private rented sector in a generation. And I understand the intention behind it, I really do. Tenants deserve security. They deserve decent homes. They deserve to be treated fairly. Nobody who has worked in this industry as long as I have would argue otherwise.
But good intentions and good outcomes are not the same thing, and I am watching the early signs of what this legislation is doing to landlord confidence – not only here in Edgware, but across the country – and I am not encouraged.
What I am seeing on the ground
The landlord exodus that some predicted has not yet arrived in the numbers that the more alarmist commentators had forecast. The sky has not fallen in; or at least, not yet. But I am having conversations I was not having two or three years ago. Landlords who have been with me for decades, in some cases, are asking questions they never used to. Is it still worth it? Should I sell up? What happens if I can’t get a tenant out when I need the property back?
These are not bad landlords. These are not exploitative landlords. These are people who invested in property – in many cases, their pension, their retirement plan, their financial security – and who are now looking at a legislative landscape that feels increasingly hostile, questioning whether the returns still justify the risk and the hassle.
Some have already made their decision. It is by no means a flood – but it is enough to notice.
The investment case is weakening
Property investment was seen by many as a way to provide both income and capital growth. That was the deal; you accepted the responsibilities of being a landlord in exchange for an asset that appreciated over time and generated a reliable income along the way.
The capital growth side of that equation has become less dependable. In some areas – and I see this in parts of my own market – property value growth has been flat or modest for several years. According to Dataloft, which crunches data from the ONS, Land Registry and other sources, house sale prices in Edgware have increased by 25% over the past 10 years; the recorded sale prices of flats, on the other hand, have increased by 9.6% in the same period. And many flats are owned and let out by buy-to-let landlords.
Landlords have leaned on rental income to make the numbers work, and that yield has helped carry the investment where capital appreciation has not.
But now the income side of the bargain has come under threat too.
A reported potential rent freeze – which the Chancellor declined to rule out this week, whatever Downing Street said afterwards – would lock landlords into static income at precisely the moment when their costs are anything but static.
A few days later, and Housing Secretary Steve Reed has now come out – with a note of irritation in his statement, in my view – to categorically rule this out. But for many landlords, they will feel that Pandora has opened her box. The spectre of rent control is now out there, and it gives stretched landlords something else to now add to their list of worries. Maybe not now, but could it happen one day? It is a question that, due to reckless rumour mongering, will now be on the minds of many.
Landlords, or at least many of them, are already at the end of their tether.
Compliance costs have risen. Licensing schemes have piled on further risk, more cost and extra red tape. Energy efficiency requirements are set to tighten, to demand a new minimum C rating on rentals, intended to be brought into force from 2030, subject to legislation being approved.
In other words, the administrative burden of being a private landlord in 2025 bears almost no resemblance to what it was when I joined the family business in 1994, and the cost of meeting that burden falls almost entirely on the landlord.
The Renters’ Rights Act adds another layer
I want to be clear that I am not opposed to all of what the Renters’ Rights Act does. Abolishing genuinely no-fault evictions, in principle, is defensible. Tenants should not live in fear of arbitrary notice.
But the practical reality of what this legislation asks of landlords – the removal of tools that responsible landlords relied upon to manage their properties sensibly, the additional process and cost involved in any possession case, the chilling effect on landlords who simply cannot afford to be stuck with a non-paying tenant for months while a new tribunal process grinds along – this will change the calculus for a significant number of people. Not to mention the additional risks imposed by prohibiting advance rent, effectively requiring landlords to accept pets against their wishes, and removing the safety net of a minimum twelve-month assured shorthold tenancy.
And to top it off, the level of fines imposed for being in breach, up to £7,000 even for a minor breach, rising to £40,000 for the most serious. No wonder my clients are asking the questions they are asking.
The landlords most likely to stay are those with the deepest pockets and the most professional operations.
The landlords most likely to leave are the smaller, individual investors. The ones who own one or two properties, who got into this market twenty or thirty years ago because it seemed like a sensible thing to do, or inherited a property that it made sense to let out. The ones who have been decent landlords and decent people throughout, and who now look at the paperwork, the risk, and the political climate and think: enough is enough.
Those are exactly the landlords this sector cannot afford to lose, because they are not going to be replaced quickly. A new generation of younger landlords with a professional mindset is emerging, and that is welcome, but they are not arriving in the numbers that would offset a significant exit by the existing cohort. And the government is certainly not building the social and affordable housing that would fill the gap.
My view: The government needs to wake up
I have enormous respect for the principle that tenants should be protected. I have no desire to return to an era of crooked landlords renting out damp, infested flats, subjecting unwitting and unprotected tenants to midnight evictions. That world was wrong, and nobody should defend it. But it is also decades behind us. The market had already moved way past that.
The private rented sector serves a function that this government has not found another way to fulfil, and that is the danger if constant meddling – and, in many ways, villainising – drives good landlords away.
Millions of people in this country live in private rented homes. 29% of Edgware’s population lives in privately rented accommodation. They are not there by accident, but by design. They are there because there is not enough social housing, not enough affordable housing, and not enough new supply of any kind being built fast enough to meet demand.
Private landlords are not the enemy of good housing policy. In many cases, they are propping up a market the government has failed to provide for in any other way.
If ministers want to reduce rents, there is one proven mechanism: build more homes. Expand supply. Give tenants genuine alternatives. Everything else – freezes, caps, controls – is but a short-term political gesture that treats the symptom while making the underlying disease worse.
I have been doing this job for over thirty years. I have seen a lot of policies come and go. Some of them helped. Some of them hurt. The ones that hurt always had one thing in common: they treated landlords as a problem to be managed rather than a part of the solution to be worked with.
This government is making that mistake. And I hope, before it is too late, that someone in a position of influence has the courage to say so.