Nothing says "we've got this sorted" quite like families staring at another rent hike while the politicians pat themselves on the back for another layer of tenant protections. Rightmove's latest numbers land like a landlord's polite notice: average advertised rents outside the capital have climbed to a shiny new record of £1,397 per month. That's up 1.9 per cent on the quarter and 2.3 per cent from last year. In London the figure sits at £2,791, equally record-breaking and equally unsurprising.
The data, released around mid-July, shows the number of rental homes available slipped one per cent compared with a year earlier. First decline since 2022. Not because properties are flying off the market faster, mind you, but because fewer new ones are being listed in the first place. Supply isn't growing. It's shrinking. And yet the usual suspects will still insist the problem is greedy landlords rather than the thicket of rules that make building family-sized homes such a tedious ordeal.
Enquiries per property have eased to 10 from 11 a year ago and well below the 2022 peak of 22. Comforting, until you remember the pre-pandemic average was five. The market feels less frantic than during the pandemic scramble, but the pressure on ordinary households has not magically vanished. Growth has simply slipped back into those familiar seasonal patterns after the Renters’ Rights Act arrived in May. How convenient. A law sold as revolutionary turns out to have delivered the thrilling innovation of... rents behaving like rents again.
We're seeing new record average rents advertised in both London and Great Britain outside of the capital, however overall, we're seeing rents return to more familiar seasonal patterns and stable growth.
That was Colleen Babcock at Rightmove, delivering the polite corporate version of "told you so." She went on to note that even with supply no longer increasing, the market remains more balanced than at the height of the 2022 madness. Regional differences persist, with northern areas that still feel vaguely affordable posting some of the stronger growth. London, predictably, saw the largest drop in available rental stock and the sharpest rent jump this quarter. Local realities, it seems, refuse to bow to national slogans.
This is what happens when policy obsesses over regulating existing stock instead of expanding it. Every fresh restriction, every added compliance burden, every signal that landlords are the enemy rather than partners in housing people, nudges marginal properties out of the private rental market. Fewer new listings follow. Prices for what remains tick higher. Young families, the very people ministers claim to champion, find themselves paying more for less security and less choice. The Renters’ Rights Act was meant to tilt the scales toward tenants. In practice it has helped tilt supply in the wrong direction.
The deeper failure is the decades-long reluctance to build the homes families actually want: houses with gardens, space for children, roots in communities rather than perpetual renting. Instead we get tighter rental rules, louder talk of social housing targets, and a stubborn refusal to unleash the market mechanisms and local incentives that might actually deliver genuine supply. The result is predictable. Record rents. Squeezed budgets. Delayed family formation. And the same pundits ready with the same prescriptions that made the mess in the first place.