Why You Bought London
We are a letting agent. If you hold, we earn; if you sell, we don’t. Weigh everything on this page with that in mind. We would rather you leave with the whole picture than stay on half of one — and some of you should sell. When that’s true of you, we’ll say it to your face. What follows is data and context, not a recommendation to buy, hold or sell any investment.
The Renters’ Rights Act 2025
Section 21 abolished, rental bidding banned, Section 13 the only route to raise rent. Less flexibility, more process. Real.
Tax that no longer flatters
Section 24 restricting mortgage-interest relief, and a raised Stamp Duty surcharge on additional homes. The maths is tighter than it was.
The overseas cost stack
The Non-Resident Landlord scheme, currency exposure, cross-border accountancy. For an NRL, the frictions add up.
The running costs
Letting fees, management, compliance certificates, refurbishment between tenancies. None of it is free, and we won’t say it is.
If you bought a London flat for the monthly income, this climate is genuinely hard, and no chart changes that. But that was rarely the reason. Here is what the reason actually was.
Read the black line and London looks like a rocket. Read the brown line — the same prices in today’s money — and you see the truth: London has fallen hard, more than once, and made investors wait more than a decade to get back to level. It is a decades asset, not a years one. London asks a patience most assets don’t — better to know now whether you have it than to find out in the middle of a downturn.
A store of wealth you can stand inside.
The spine of it: you’re feeling a yield problem and calling it a capital problem — and they are not the same thing. London residential was never a high-income asset. It is a low-yield, high-security, long-hold store of value: rule of law, a stable currency, an asset the whole world recognises and few can take from you. For an overseas owner, that safety was usually the whole reason — and none of this year’s headlines has touched it.
The Scar Chart earns this the honest way: across fifty years, through two brutal real-terms drawdowns, the patient holder still ended far ahead. Not because London can’t fall — it plainly can — but because the reasons people want to own here have outlasted every downturn so far. Past is not a promise. It is a record.
London keeps pulling people in.
Not a “better class of tenant” — we don’t grade people, and the law rightly forbids it. Something steadier: London draws the world for work, study, medicine, culture, so there is always someone who needs a well-run home here. That depth of demand is what protects your asset — lower long-run voids, steadier tenancies — not the type of person inside it.
And the demand runs into a wall of supply. That gap is the engine under both the rent you collect and the price you hold.
Price it right — which is the whole of our day-one thesis — and the city keeps refilling the pool, so it lets. We don’t chase a headline rent; we don’t need to. Depth does the work.
The empty chip is the point. We will chart the drivers to 2050 — population, households, the build gap — and leave the price cell blank, permanently. Anyone who fills it is guessing. Notice, too, what the real column shows: 2015’s £456k was worth £717k in today’s money, and today’s London sits below that. The last ten years were not a boom. We’d rather you saw that here than discovered it after.
Sometimes the honest answer is: sell.
- The capital has a better job to do — a business, a pension, a need the equity serves more than a London flat does.
- The squeeze is genuinely breaking your plan — the cashflow no longer works and holding is hope, not strategy.
- Life has moved — you’re consolidating, retiring abroad, simplifying. A portfolio should fit the life, not the other way round.
- You can’t hold through a lost decade — and this asset, on its own record, sometimes asks exactly that.
Sources & method
- House prices: Nationwide House Price Index — Greater London, all properties, quarterly from 1973.
- Real terms: Nationwide nominal deflated by the ONS Retail Prices Index (RPI, CHAW) to Q2 2026 money. Real series shown from 1987, where RPI is on the same basis; earlier years shown nominal.
- Housing supply: MHCLG net additional dwellings (England); the London Plan / GLA housing targets and delivery.
- Population: ONS (UK) and the UN World Population Prospects 2024 (world).
- We report these figures and add our reading. We compute no index of our own, and we forecast no price.
Cite this page
For landlords, analysts and students:
A standing page, revised only when the data revises — each revision logged.