Making sense of the rental supply figures – is the landlord exodus a reality?

Official data says the private rented sector has never been bigger, but agents report that home rentals are vanishing. Landlords tell us they are selling up. Who is right? 

Comment by Tom Entwistle, LandlordZONE

The number of homes advertised to rent in England fell by 12 per cent in a single quarter, according to new analysis from The Letting Partnership, dropping from 127,696 in Q2 2026 to 112,190 in Q3. This is reported by the LandlordZONE article here: https://www.landlordzone.co.uk/news/rental-stock-falls-12-amid-landlord-exodus-fears  

This article is for general information only and does not constitute legal, tax or financial advice. It applies to the rental market in England. Landlords should take professional advice before making decisions.

What is being counted? 

The government's official statistics tell us the private rented sector is at its largest in decades. Other evidence points the other way. 

Can these different sets of figures be true at one and the same time? The contrasting evidence, debate and arguments each way don’t help us understand what’s happening. Why does it matter? It matters to every landlord trying to decide whether to stay, sell or expand.

The above report, which we ran on LandlordZONE this week, resulted in a lively comment response from readers. Several described selling up, six properties in one case and thirty in another. Others said they would not re-let when their current tenants moved on. 

One reader countered that UK rental housing stock had passed five million homes for the first time. Another made a telling point: the number of rental properties and the number of available rental properties are not the same thing.

This observation is a useful insight into the whole debate. Much of the disagreement over whether hordes of landlords are leaving - leaving tenants in the lurch - arises out of people quoting figures that measure different things. 

Three different aspects

When we consider if the rental sector is shrinking, we should be asking three separate questions.

The first is about housing stock: how many homes in total are privately rented? The second question is about movement or churn: how many homes are moving in and out of the sector at any one time? This is when landlords sell to owner-occupiers, buy, convert, develop, inherit or build? The third is about availability: how many landlords are registered with agents and have vacancies, and how many homes are advertised to let at any given time?

What the official figures don’t always tell us

On 31 March 2025 the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government's (MHCLG) dwelling stock estimates put privately rented homes in England at 5 million; that’s an increase of 54,000 on the year before and 19.5 per cent of all dwellings in England. 

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Official statistics show - There were 25.8 million dwellings in England as of 31 March 2025, an increase of 208,600 dwellings or 0.81% on the previous year. 16.6 million dwellings were owner-occupied dwellings, an increase of 131,000 dwellings on the previous year, 5 million dwellings were private rented dwellings, an increase of 54,000 dwellings on the previous year, 4.2 million dwellings were social and affordable rented dwellings (stock owned by Private Registered Providers and Local Authorities), an increase of 25,000 dwellings on the previous year and 28,200 dwellings were other public sector dwellings, a decrease of 900 dwellings on the previous year.

In addition, there were 754,264 vacant dwellings in England on 6 October 2025, an increase of 34,794 or 4.8% from 719,470 on 7 October 2024 and there were 303,185 long-term vacant dwellings in England on 6 October 2025, an increase of 38,301 or 14.5% from 264,884 on 7 October 2024.

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The English Housing Survey recorded 4.7 million privately renting households in 2024/25, the highest on record, while protected tenancy deposits reached a similar 4.7 million across England and Wales by March 2025.

The reader whole claimed the PRS had passed the five million point was correct, but with one important qualification. That figure is a snapshot taken in March 2025 and published in May 2026. It is not the latest 2026 figure, a period of rapid change with the introduction of the Renters’ Rights Act. 

Official statistics always run behind events, so the estimates for 31 March 2026 will not appear until May 2027. Even then they will predate the Renters' Rights Act. The reality is, official data cannot tell us conclusively what has happened over the transition period to the RRA and beyond. 

The case that landlords are leaving

Churn or flow data is where the exodus data gives the strongest argument. Hamptons analysis of Connells’ Group sales data finds that landlords sold more homes than they bought in every year from 2016 to 2025. 

Savills tracking of homes sold by landlords to owner-occupiers against those going the other way estimates a net loss of around 200,000 rental homes, or 4.2 per cent, between October 2022 and November 2025. 

When I wrote in March that something like 200,000 rental homes may have left the sector, it was this kind of evidence I had found.

HMRC's latest statistics show 2.88 million unincorporated landlords declaring rental income across the UK in 2024/25, which several commentators have read as around 30,000 fewer individual landlords than the year before. Survey evidence points the same way: English Private Landlord Survey figures cited by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) show the share of landlords intending to sell doubling from 16 to 32 per cent between 2018 and 2024.

And, of course, there are the landlords themselves. The decisions described in our comments section are real. But intentions are not transactions, and for years landlord sentiment surveys have pointed sharply towards selling while the official stock figures carried on rising.

The case that it's churn, not collapse

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation Private Rented Sector Briefing published on 17 September 2026 challenges the claims that landlord departures are shrinking the private rented sector. It repeated the official data showing instead that England's stock surpassed five million homes in 2025.

The report, already reported on Landlord ZONE, argues that the evidence shows industry consolidation rather than contraction. It is worth noting that the JRF, an anti-poverty charity, has always argued that the private rented sector does not need to grow and further regulation will not drive landlords out, but its central point about the data seems sound.

Sales data counts homes leaving yet misses out many of the means by which new rental homes arrive. Hamptons recorded a record of around 67,000 new buy-to-let companies set up in 2025. So, any fall in individual landlords may simply reflect them or other landlords moving their portfolios into limited companies. 

That’s when HMRC's personal tax statistics no longer see them. In other cases, homes are let out by owners who move or inherit, and don’t forget, the growing build-to-rent sector has now delivered around 157,000 homes.

The latest data from Hamptons, whose figures have long been quoted as evidence of the sell-off, has its July report concluding that the scale of landlord selling has often been overstated and that rental homes in England which have stayed broadly flat at about 4.8 million over the past decade. 

In June 2026, landlords accounted for a larger share of purchases (10.2 per cent) than of sale listings (9.2 per cent), for the first time since 2019. Hamptons' explanation of this is that most landlords who wanted to leave because of the RRA had already done so.

Why then fewer homes are on the market?

If total stock is broadly flat, why are tenants finding it difficult to find rentals? This could lie in turnover. Average private tenancies have lengthened from 3.5 years in 2013/14 to 4.7 years; that’s according to English Housing Survey figures analysed by the JRF. 

Tenants staying longer means fewer homes come up for re-letting. This will happen even if the total doesn't change. The JRF calculates that falling turnover alone could cut new listings by nearly 20 per cent while the sector was still growing.

The Renters' Rights Act is likely to reinforce these longer stays. As one LandlordZONE reader pointed out, a tenant now must give at least two months' notice, often closer to three in practice, and may struggle to pass tougher referencing checks to obtain their next rental.  In this situation many will simply stay put.

 Zoopla has reported 3 per cent fewer homes to rent than 12 months ago. That’s the first annual fall it has seen in three years, though it attributes the higher mortgage rates as keeping would-be buyers renting for longer. 

Against that background The Letting Partnership's figures should be viewed with caution. Its research comparison runs from the spring into the summer letting peak, when homes are usually snapped up quickly and listings naturally fall. Annual comparisons are much more reliable. 

The source and method of its data have not been published, and the company is a supplier of accounting services to letting agents. It doesn’t mean its numbers are wrong, but 15,500 fewer adverts is a fall in availability, not necessarily a 12 per cent loss of landlords. This figure equates to just about 0.3 per cent of the total rental stock.

There is one genuine supply risk created by the RRA itself. A landlord who serves notice under Ground 1A to sell cannot re-let the property for 12 months, even if it fails to sell. Hamptons experience shows that in 2025 around 51 per cent of landlord rental sale listings failed to sell. It estimates that, had the new RRA rule applied in 2025, 80,000 to 100,000 homes would have been barred from the rental market for 12 months. That is a reality that the new legislation has brought about. 

What this all means for landlords and agents

My own reading, which matches what I wrote in last week's assessment of the Act's first months, is that we are seeing a reshuffle rather than a total rout. Smaller, mortgaged individual landlords are without doubt gradually leaving, while limited company landlords, larger portfolio owners and institutional investors are taking up the slack. Overall, the total rental housing stock level looks to be broadly flat, but the ownership profile is changing.

The landlords’ experience

For tenants, a rental housing shortage feels real because fewer homes are coming up for re-letting. The situation is worse in some places than others, notably inner London and other big cities. 

For landlords who stay, it means demand is still firm, longer tenancies and fewer voids, but also more work, higher costs and a bit more risk. The market is rewarding the well-organised and squeezing out the marginal and the rogues.

Regulation is not always a bad thing for those in an industry. It eliminates unfair competition. Strict compliance requirements make it more exacting but also more expensive for new competitors to enter the market. This protects established operators from being undercut by cheaper, lower-quality startups.

Government backing or certification also reassures tenants that the landlords’ product is safer and more reliable. This boosts overall market demand and benefits all those landlords who are compliant. 

The picture will be clearer

The new “Register your rental property” service begins on 15 December 2026, starting as an introductory trial in the West Midlands. Once all actively let properties are registered in England we should have, for the first time, a very clear direct count of landlords and their rented homes. 

This will be a big change from relying on estimates drawn from surveys, adverts and sales records and the government’s out of date statistics. However, it comes at a cost. Landlords are forced to pay for the service by way of a £65 annual fee for every rental they own and there’s the loss of privacy.

Tom Entwistle writes for LandlordZONE, the views expressed are his own.

[Main image credit: Connor Danylenko]