A few months into the Renters' Rights Act, and the effect I'm seeing isn't the one that got the headlines.
The debate was all about tenants and evictions. What's actually showing up on the ground is a slow reshaping of supply. Some landlords, especially the accidental ones with a single flat and no appetite for the new regime, are quietly deciding it isn't for them and putting the property up for sale. That stock is landing in a sales market that's already well supplied, and it's one more reason buyers currently have so much choice.
For those of us running student HMOs, the picture is different again. The Act kept a route to recover a property at the end of the academic year through the new Ground 4A, as long as you set the tenancy up correctly from the outset. Get the paperwork right at the start and the model still works. Get it wrong and you've lost the mechanism that makes student letting viable at all.
The wider lesson is one every regulated sector teaches you eventually. Rule changes rarely do the obvious thing. They don't simply raise or lower standards. They move who's willing to operate, and where the supply goes. The operators who come through a change like this well aren't the ones with the strongest opinion about it. They're the ones who read the detail early and adjusted before they had to.
Co-founder of Propalt and a property investor and developer for 20 years
