Portfolio landlords are buying up homes at the fastest pace in almost a decade, hoovering up stock from amateur investors who are abandoning the sector under the weight of higher taxes, costlier mortgages and the new Renters’ Rights Act.
Fresh analysis from Connells Group, the country’s largest high street estate agency with 1,200 branches, reveals that landlords accounted for 13.3 per cent of all buyers in Britain between January and April, the highest share since 2016, and a significant jump from 9.9 per cent in the same period last year.
More tellingly for those tracking the changing shape of the private rented sector, almost a quarter of the homes those landlords purchased, 22.9 per cent, were sold by other landlords. That is up from 16 per cent a year ago and more than double the 2019-2023 average of 9.9 per cent, pointing to a wholesale transfer of stock from so-called “dinner-party” landlords with one or two properties into the hands of professional, full-time investors.
The north-south divide widens
The geography of the buy-to-let market is being redrawn in real time. In the North West, landlords accounted for a quarter of all home purchases (25.3 per cent) between January and April, double the 12.3 per cent recorded in 2025. In the North East, investors snapped up 23.8 per cent of properties sold.
Contrast that with the South, where rental yields have been crushed by years of capital growth: landlords made up just 10.1 per cent of buyers in London, 8.7 per cent in the South East and a meagre 8.1 per cent in the South West.
Aneisha Beveridge, head of research at Hamptons, which is owned by Connells, said the data captured a structural shift rather than a revival.
“With the Renters’ Rights Act becoming law against a backdrop of rising mortgage rates, some landlords have taken the opportunity to leave the market. Increasingly, though, they’re passing on their properties to other investors,” she said. “This means the recent spike in landlord purchases reflects homes changing hands between investors, rather than the dawn of a new buy-to-let boom.”
The long squeeze on amateur investors
The buy-to-let phenomenon exploded in the late 1990s, when specialist mortgage products first opened the door to private individuals treating residential property as an investable asset class. By 2000 some 73,200 buy-to-let loans had been written; over the following seven years lenders issued another million, worth a combined £94 billion. The sector’s high-water mark came in 2003, when annual house price growth peaked at 26.5 per cent.
A decade of policy headwinds has since hollowed out the amateur end of the market. Stamp duty surcharges were introduced in 2016 and ratcheted up again in 2025, mortgage interest relief has been progressively withdrawn, and base rate rises since autumn 2022 have transformed the maths on geared portfolios. The strengthening of tenant protections under the Renters’ Rights Act, which took effect on 1 May, has proved the final straw for many.
Separate research from Savills, published earlier this month, found 700 buy-to-let properties were being listed for sale every day, with available stock up 28 per cent on March 2024.
“Larger, full-time landlords have taken the opportunity to expand their portfolios, but that is really confined to circumstances where the returns on offer are compelling enough to outweigh the additional risks they face,” said Lucian Cook, director of residential research at Savills. “In turn, that has pushed them to higher-yielding markets in the north.”
What it means for rents
Hamptons warned that the retreat of landlords from southern markets, combined with mounting operating costs, is feeding through into higher rents. Average rents on new lets across Britain rose 3.6 per cent in the year to April, the fifth consecutive monthly increase. In inner London, growth ran at 6.7 per cent, taking the typical monthly rent to £2,840, some 23 per cent above its pre-pandemic peak.
The wider sales market is also tilting north. Rightmove reported that the average asking price of a home coming to market climbed by £4,333 month-on-month in May, a 1.2 per cent rise to £378,304, slightly ahead of the 1 per cent average usually seen at this time of year. But asking prices in the North East (up 2.7 per cent year-on-year) and North West (up 2.6 per cent) continue to outpace London and the South East, where values are down 2.4 per cent and 1.6 per cent respectively.
For investors, the message is unambiguous. The path to acceptable returns increasingly runs through higher-yielding northern markets, while the capital and the Home Counties, for so long the spiritual home of the British buy-to-let landlord, are quietly slipping off the investment map.
