14/05/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1bpfHy6D2J/?
Good read
Everyone's worried about BlackRock buying up your street. They're not. What's actually happening is worse.
BlackRock and the big institutions don't want your three-bed semi in Warrington. They don't want the ex-council flat in Sunderland. They don't want the Victorian terrace in Stoke that needs a new roof.
They want brand new apartment blocks in Manchester and Birmingham with identical kitchens, 10-year warranties, and tenants earning £45k. That's their market. That's Build to Rent.
So who's actually replacing your local landlord?
290,000 rental homes have been sold since 2021. The government spent a decade making it impossible for small landlords to stay, stripped mortgage interest relief, piled on stamp duty surcharges, demonised Section 21, and sent a clear message: get out.
And they got out. For every one property a landlord bought last year, five were sold. A record 26% of landlords sold at least one property. Only 8% bought.
Most of those homes — about 86% — went to owner-occupiers. Fine. Nobody's arguing against homeownership.
But the rental homes that stay in the sector? They're not going to the bloke down the road who owns three houses and answers his phone when your boiler breaks.
They're going to portfolio companies buying 10, 20, 50 properties through limited company structures.
Overseas investors who look at UK housing and see it as cheap compared to Frankfurt or Singapore. And increasingly, and I see this every week because I work in this space, properties are being leased to outsourcing operators like Serco for emergency and temporary housing contracts.
Your old landlord charged you £750 a month and fixed things when they broke. The replacement is a company registered in the Channel Islands with 200 units managed by a third-party agent who doesn't know your street exists.
Or it's a property on a government emergency housing contract where the priority is contract compliance, not whether you feel at home.
This is the two-tier rental market the government built without telling anyone.
Tier one: if you're a young professional earning good money, there's a shiny new Build to Rent flat waiting for you in a city centre.
Concierge. Gym. Co-working space. Lovely.
Tier two: if you're a family on a normal income who needs a three-bed semi in the suburbs, good luck. Suburban rental listings are still 31% below pre-pandemic levels.
The landlords who used to serve that market have gone. And nobody is replacing them.
130,000 Build to Rent homes delivered. 290,000 lost. At current rates, it'll take 70 years to close the gap.
Seventy.
The irony is savage. The policies designed to protect renters have produced the exact rental market renters should fear most.
Faceless. Corporate. Unaccountable.
And completely uninterested in anyone who isn't profitable enough to bother with.
This isn't a left or right problem. It's a supply problem with a class divide baked into it.
That's Point 3 of the Build Don't Blame manifesto, stop taxing rental supply out of existence.
And Point 1, incentivise every type of investor to create new homes, not just the institutional giants who can absorb the regulatory cost.
We don't need fewer landlords. We need more homes.
And until this debate shifts from blame to build, it's ordinary renters on ordinary incomes who'll keep paying the price.
