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Around 700 former rental homes are listed for sale every day across Great Britain, roughly 254,000 ex buy to let properties in the twelve months to March 2026, according to Savills. Rightmove puts the total number of homes for sale at an eleven year high. The headlines write themselves: landlords are leaving, buy to let is finished.
I’m a mortgage broker in Winchester and I speak to both sides of this. Landlords who bought years ago and are now weighing up whether to sell. And people looking at their first buy to let purchase, wondering whether they have missed the boat entirely.
The headlines miss what separates those two groups. They are looking at completely different markets, because one of them is grieving something the other never had.
Around 700 former rental homes are listed for sale every day, roughly 254,000 in the year to March 2026 (Savills).
Only around 14% of those ex rental homes are bought by another landlord, so competition from other investors is thin.
One client's £175,000 interest only loan moved from 1.32% to 4.21%, about £420 a month more for the same house.
Someone buying their first rental now prices today's rates, the 5% stamp duty surcharge and Making Tax Digital in from day one.
Winchester gross yields run near 3.8%. Southampton and Portsmouth were the only areas in my analysis clearing a 145% rent cover test at 75% loan to value.
Why legacy landlords are actually leaving
The landlords selling up are not panicking. They are doing sums, and the sums have changed underneath them.
What they tell me is that the maths does not add up any more. Rates are higher. Regulation is heavier. Insurance costs more. Tenants move more often, and every changeover costs money. So they look at the equity sitting in the property and ask whether it would work harder somewhere else.
One recent client shows the scale of it. His buy to let mortgage was on 1.32%. When that ended, his new rate was 4.21%. On his £175,000 interest only loan, that moved the monthly interest from roughly £193 to roughly £614. Same house, same tenant, about £420 a month more going to the lender. He remortgaged because sitting on the lender’s standard variable rate would have cost more again, but he is now seriously considering selling.
That is the pattern. A business plan built in the low rate years, finding out that every assumption in it has been repriced.
Selling up is easier said than done
Deciding to sell and actually selling are two different things. Stock on the market is at an eleven year high, which means every one of those ex rental homes is competing with a record number of other listings. The market is slow.
And the natural buyers are struggling too. First time buyers should be the obvious home for ex rental stock, but the deposit is the wall. With the cost of living where it is, saving one is brutal, and a large share of the first time buyers I help would not be buying without family money behind them.
One number reframes the whole story for anyone thinking about their first rental property. Of all those ex buy to let homes coming to market, Savills found only around 14% are bought by other landlords.
The exodus has not produced a gold rush. It has produced an empty field.
You cannot miss what you never had
Now flip to the person considering their first buy to let in 2026.
The legacy landlord’s pain is the gap between what they had and what they have now. A new landlord has no gap. They never had a 1.32% rate, so today’s rates are not a loss, they are just the price. They never operated before the Renters’ Rights Act, so its rules are not a burden that arrived, they are simply how letting works.
That sounds like cold comfort, but it has a practical edge that matters more than the psychology.
A new landlord’s spreadsheet is built on today’s numbers from day one. When a lender stress tests the rent at 125% to 145% of the mortgage payment, the new entrant either passes at today’s rates or does not buy. The 5% stamp duty surcharge on additional properties sits in their purchase costs before they book a viewing. Making Tax Digital, which now applies to landlords with qualifying income over £50,000, is simply how they will keep their records from the start. The 2030 EPC deadline is a line in their costings, not a letter about a property they already own.
The first time landlords I see now work from their own researched figures. They do not have years of rental income landing in the bank to reassure them, so they test whether the purchase works before they make it. Nothing in their plan depends on conditions that no longer exist, which is exactly the trap that caught the generation before them.
Most of them also start in a limited company, where landlords who bought personally years ago had to restructure the hard way after the Section 24 tax changes. A record 66,587 buy to let companies were set up in 2025, according to Hamptons. Whether a company is right for you depends on your circumstances and needs proper tax advice, but starting fresh means choosing the structure first and buying second.
Speak to an expert
Want to know whether a specific property stacks up at today’s rates and stress tests? Call me on 01425 203055 or email info@htgmortgages.com. I will run the numbers with you before you offer.
What the numbers look like around here
Honesty about my own patch: Winchester is hard. Gross yields here run around 3.8%, near the bottom of the sixteen areas I track, so if you want monthly income rather than a long term bet on capital growth, the sums rarely work. And capital growth is never guaranteed.
Southampton and Portsmouth are a different story. Better yields, and when I ran the local numbers at 75% loan to value under a 5.5% stress rate, they were the only two areas in my patch where the rent cleared a 145% cover test for a personal purchase. More areas pass at the 125% test that usually applies to limited company purchases.
That is the kind of homework the new generation of landlords is doing anyway. Buying where the numbers work rather than where they happen to live is normal for them, another habit the low rate era never forced on anyone.
An empty field, not a closed door
Nobody is really buying right now. UK Finance reported buy to let purchase lending down 14.9% in the first quarter of 2026, while buy to let remortgaging rose. Add the stamp duty surcharge and it is easy to read the whole market as a warning sign.
But an empty field cuts both ways. Record stock, few competing buyers and sellers who have already decided to leave all shift the negotiating position towards anyone who does buy. And someone starting out is not limited to what departing landlords are selling. They can look across the whole market and buy the property that fits their numbers, not the one that fits the story.
My honest answer
When someone asks me whether now is a stupid time to become a landlord, I tell them this. If you have done your research and you want to do it, I will help you every step of the way. I will not talk you into buy to let or out of it. What I will do is tell you whether the numbers in front of us actually work, at today’s rates, under today’s rules, because those are the only rates and rules you will ever have.
You can browse all of my buy to let articles in one place if you want more landlord reading.
If you want the bigger picture on where rates might go next, I have covered what July’s UK inflation figures mean for the Bank of England’s next move.
When you are ready to act, my guide to selling a tenanted property sets out the two routes available since May 2026 and the timings for each.
One buyer landlords often overlook is the sitting tenant; my guide to selling to the tenant who already lives there covers that route from their side.
Need Personal Mortgage Advice?
Every buyer’s situation is different. While this guide explains the general rules, the right mortgage for you depends on your income, deposit, credit history and future plans. If you’d like tailored advice, I’m here to help, with whole-of-market coverage.
The Mortgage Works’ Q2 2026 landlord survey backs this up at a national level: 43% of landlords say they intend to sell a property in the next 12 months, against just 6% planning to buy. I’ve covered what else that data shows, including the regional yield picture, in this Q2 2026 buy to let market update.
Related reading: selling a tenanted property, buying the house you rent from your landlord, and the latest data on how many landlords are actually selling versus buying.