Small landlords could suffer the same fate as village pubs after the smoking ban, a property expert has warned, with big operators taking over the sector.

The Renters’ Rights Act looks set to create a market that is likely to be smaller, more consolidated, and more corporate than the one it replaces, according to Anna Clare Harper, a director of property developer and investment firm Pinnacle Investments. Writing in FT Advisor, she says this means higher standards, but fewer options, better rules, and only bigger players.

Harper says while the 2007 pub smoking ban was the right call, combined with tax changes, it accelerated a roughly 20% reduction in the total number of pubs, and the concentration of those that remain in the hands of a small number of large chains.

“The independently run local pubs who could not absorb higher costs, more compliance and lower revenues simply closed; some replaced by chains, others boarded up or converted into flats,” she says. “Nobody decided pubs should be mostly chains. It just became the only model that worked.

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“The private rental sector is likely to follow a similar pattern. The compliance burden of the new Renters’ Rights Act, combined with existing tax and regulatory pressures, makes small-scale buy-to-let an increasingly unattractive proposition.”

Harper says the likely beneficiaries will be institutional investors: large, well-capitalised operators with the systems, legal resources, and operational sophistication to absorb regulatory complexity at scale. “In 2026, private landlords are the family owners of the village pub. Once institutional capital moves in at scale and individual landlords sell up, the structural shift becomes self-reinforcing.”

The Act may well deliver a safer deal for renters, adds Harper, but in the short term, landlords and tenants alike are likely to feel the squeeze - landlords facing compliance costs and court delays they cannot absorb, tenants facing a shrinking pool of homes at rising rents, just as the protections designed to help them come into force. “The people the Act is trying to protect may, for a while at least, be worse off because of it.”

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