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Property118 Landlord Sentiment Survey (Q2 2026)

ended 07. August 2026

A recent survey of 2,096 landlords by Property118 found that, over the past two years, just over half of landlords (53.8%) report their portfolio has stayed roughly the same size, while four in ten (40.2%) have been shrinking their portfolio through sales. Only 6% have been growing. Another key finding is that, in the next three years, more than two-thirds of landlords (67.7%) expect to sell some properties or exit the sector entirely, against fewer than one in ten (9.5%) planning to buy. The proportion intending to exit completely has climbed to 27.1%.

What are your thoughts? Is this consistent with what you're seeing on the ground? What does this say about the future of B2L? If 27% of landlords intend to exit, what will this mean for rental costs and how could it impact tenants?

5 responses from the Newspage community

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Thomas George
Director at Mansell McTaggart
The small landlord is leaving. The corporate giant is moving in..and nobody's talking about it. While 40% of landlords shrink their portfolios and 27% plan to exit entirely, a handful of well-capitalised companies are quietly hoovering up discounted stock at scale. This isn't coincidence. This is strategy. We are sleepwalking into the monopolisation of the British rental market. Corporate landlords. Factory approach. Soulless, standardised, transactional. The personal landlord who knew your name and hadn't raised your rent in three years? Gone. Replaced by a call centre and a rent review clause. Rental income, one of the last accessible wealth-building tools for ordinary people is being consolidated upward into institutional hands. The Government set out to protect tenants. They may have handed their homes to the very people tenants should fear most.
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Mark Alexander
Founder at Property118.com
The worrying number isn’t simply that 27% of landlords are considering leaving altogether. It’s that for every landlord planning to buy, more than seven are planning to sell properties or exit. Not every intention will become a sale, of course, but that imbalance should concern policymakers. If rental supply continues to contract while demand remains strong, tenants will ultimately feel it through less choice, greater competition for homes and further upward pressure on rents.

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Nouran Moustafa
Practice Principal & IFA at Roxton Wealth
This reflects what many advisers are already seeing. Landlords aren’t leaving because demand has disappeared; they’re leaving because the numbers increasingly don’t stack up. Higher borrowing costs, tax changes, tighter regulation and rising compliance costs have all squeezed profitability, particularly for smaller landlords. The risk is that demand for rental homes isn’t falling at the same pace as supply. If more landlords sell than enter the market, tenants are likely to face even higher rents and fewer properties to choose from. Ironically, measures designed to improve affordability could make renting more expensive if supply continues to shrink. The future of buy-to-let will increasingly belong to well-capitalised, professional landlords, while smaller investors may continue to exit unless the economic and regulatory environment becomes more balanced.
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Editor
Harvey Dhillon
Founder & CEO at Zmartly
Surveys catch a mood. Completed sales test it, and they come much later. Selling a rental home starts a tax clock. You have 60 days from completion to report and pay any Capital Gains Tax. Only £3,000 of the gain is tax free, per owner. On a home held for years, that leaves almost all of it taxed. If you are weighing an exit, work out your 60-day bill before you call an agent. Plenty of landlords do that sum and stay another year. The mood in that survey matches what we hear. We hear it far more often than we file it. If you own outside a company, mortgage interest stopped being a deductible expense in April 2020. You are taxed on rent you never kept. You get 20 per cent of that interest back, but only up to your profit, and sometimes less. The sector does not empty. It changes hands, away from small, mortgaged landlords, towards owners that interest rule does not touch. Tenants feel that as rents drifting up. Some will get a notice because their landlord finally sold.
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Editor
Babek Ismayil
CEO at homebuying platform OneDome
Tenants in many areas of the country are already facing extremely steep rents, which makes it very hard to save for a deposit to get onto the property ladder. Finding a deposit is by a distance one of the biggest challenges first-time buyers face. If more than a quarter of landlords are planning to leave the sector altogether, rents could climb higher and make homeownership even more of a hurdle.