Aug

Giving Up Equity Can Feel Like a Risk. Our Repeat Landlords Tell a Different Story.

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Property118

Giving Up Equity Can Feel Like a Risk. Our Repeat Landlords Tell a Different Story.

When landlords first speak to us about selling, one of the biggest questions is understandably price.

Landlord Sales Agency doesn’t promise every seller the highest possible theoretical value for their property. Instead, we agree the amount they are happy to receive and use the equity above that figure to create a sale: finding the right buyer, solving problems with tenants, keeping transactions moving and covering many of the costs that would otherwise come out of the landlord’s pocket.

For someone who has spent years building equity, agreeing to accept less than the full vacant-possession value can understandably feel like a big decision.

But there is one thing that perhaps says more about whether landlords think it is worthwhile than anything we could say ourselves. They come back. Time and time again.

Many of the landlords we work with are experienced property investors who have owned rental properties for years, benefited from substantial capital growth and are now choosing to release some or all of that equity on their own terms.

They know what their properties are worth. They also know what their time is worth, what an empty property costs and how quickly a seemingly straightforward sale can become anything but straightforward.

One Landlord. Seven Properties. Plenty Of Different Problems.

One Manchester landlord first came to us in 2021 when he was beginning to sell off part of a long-held portfolio.

His first property had a tenant who had already found somewhere else to live. Rather than wait until it was empty before starting the sales process, we contacted the tenants and by working with them instead of around them, we were able to market the property immediately. We found a cash buyer who was happy to secure the sale with a non-refundable deposit and coordinated completion around the tenant’s move.

We completed in 64 days, he received his agreed £115,000 and the property was only empty for 2 weeks so he collected rent for the rest of the period.

Our sellers walk away with 85 – 90 % of the property’s vacant possession value but giving up equity on paper didn’t necessarily mean giving up money in the bank.

On paper, accepting £115,000 against an estimated £130,000 open-market value might look like giving up £15,000 in equity. But properties don’t usually sell for their full asking price.

If a conventional sale achieved around 95% of asking price, that £130,000 becomes £123,500. Take off around £5,000 in agency and legal costs, plus £3,300–£4,950 in lost rent and an estimated £1,200–£1,800 in basic costs if the property stood empty for six to nine months, and the seller could actually have ended up with LESS left over than he received from us.

Even if he received 100% of the asking price, the amount left in the bank after all fees and costs are calculated would be in the region of £118,000–£120,000.

That’s not a lot more for a HUGE difference in time and risk.

The seller obviously thought the trade-off was good value. Since that first property, we have now dealt with six more of his properties – and they certainly haven’t all been as straightforward as the first.

We’ve sold properties with tenants remaining in situ and properties where tenants were preparing to leave. We’ve worked around tenants who were difficult to contact or reluctant to provide access, found replacement buyers when sales fell through and negotiated solutions to survey problems rather than allowing them to derail transactions.

During the course of the sales, we’ve acted as mediators to settle disputes and used our contacts to find solutions to stop sales collapsing. We’ve chased councils and helped tenants move to negate the need for bailiffs. We’ve tracked down missing paperwork, arranged builders, surveyors and inspectors to satisfy concerns and resolve issues.

These are the types of problems that cause sales to collapse when they’re discovered too late or not resolved quickly enough.

With high street sales, these sorts of problems are usually left to the seller or their solicitor to solve – when you sell through Landlord Sales agency, we take all that off your shoulders. We manage the whole process from listing to completion and make it our responsibility to solve any problem at every stage.

Our Manchester seller is not an isolated example. We have repeat clients all over the country and their business accounts for a significant percentage of our sales.

Experienced Landlords Understand the Difference

Although we can certainly help ALL seller find solution to any issue they might have whether that is in relation to the property, their tenants, timing or cash flow, the majority of landlords who come back to us are not distressed sellers and they haven’t run out of options.

Most have owned property for decades, they’ve made good returns, built substantial equity and they have simply reached the point in their life and their business where they want to access some of their wealth tied into their properties without the process of releasing it to become another difficult job to deal with.

Some sell one property and retain the rest. Others gradually reduce their portfolios over several years. Some use the released equity elsewhere.

We Don’t Expect You to Take Our Word for It

Every company says its service is good. Repeat business is proof it’s the best.

A landlord who uses us once has seen the numbers. They’ve seen what they received, what we received and exactly what we did to get the property sold.

When that same landlord comes back with a second, third or seventh property, we think that’s a considerably more useful endorsement than anything we could put in an advert.

It doesn’t mean accepting less than vacant-possession value will be right for every landlord or every property. It means there is another way to look at the decision.

Rather than asking “How much equity am I giving up?” ask “What is that equity buying me?”

If it buys a buyer, keeps the rent coming in for most of the sales process, helps a tenant move without a lengthy possession battle, solves problems as they arise and gets the equity you do want released into your bank account sooner, it may prove to be money very well used.

Find Out What Your Options Look Like

If you’re considering selling one property, part of a portfolio or exiting completely, talk to us before you talk to your tenant or start down the route of obtaining vacant possession.

Once you start down the possession-for-sale route, changing your mind can have serious consequences, including restrictions on re-letting, substantial fines and potentially a Rent Repayment Order.

There’s no obligation to proceed with our service and no false promises to win your business – just straight-talking, honest opinion based on recent sales of similar properties in the same areas as those you want to sell.

We’ll look at the property, the tenancy, what you want to achieve, then tell you what we believe we can do to help you leave the PRS on your terms.

If you’re happy with the amount you’ll receive, we’ll take care of the hard work from there – including working with your tenants, finding the right buyer and solving the problems that stand between you and completion.

No pressure to sell. Just the opportunity to see whether putting a little of your equity to work could make releasing the rest considerably easier.

Contact us today and your property sale could be complete before Xmas.

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Aug

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HMO planning refusals have doubled – where are tenants supposed to live

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HMO planning refusals have doubled – where are tenants supposed to live

Councils refused 1,203 HMO planning applications in 2025. In 2021, the figure was 590.

There is an important caveat. The number of applications being decided also increased sharply, from 1,848 to 3,454 across the same 144 English councils. Therefore, councils have not suddenly become twice as likely to refuse an HMO application. The approval rate fell from 68.1% to 65.2%.

Even so, the practical result is that 613 more HMO applications were refused in 2025 than four years earlier.

Those refusals did not make the people looking for affordable rooms disappear. They merely prevented more of those rooms from being provided legally.

That is the part of the story councils rarely seem willing to confront.

An HMO is somebody’s home

HMO has become one of those phrases that immediately sets off alarm bells in local council meetings.

We hear about parking, bins, noise, overcrowding and the loss of family homes. Some of those concerns will be perfectly legitimate. Badly designed HMOs should not be approved and badly managed HMOs should not be allowed to continue operating.

However, not every HMO is a cramped house run by a rogue landlord.

A well-designed and properly managed HMO can provide decent accommodation for people who cannot afford, or do not want, an entire flat to themselves. That includes students, young professionals, key workers, people relocating for work, couples separating and those simply trying to get back on their feet.

For many of them, the realistic choice is not between an HMO room and a spacious one-bedroom flat.

It is between an HMO room, an unaffordable flat, a long commute, somebody’s sofa or whatever informal arrangement they can find.

Councils can refuse the planning application, but they cannot regulate that demand out of existence.

Article 4 is changing the commercial calculation

In many parts of England, the conversion of a normal C3 dwelling into a small C4 HMO for three to six unrelated occupiers can take place under permitted development rights.

An Article 4 Direction removes that right within the area covered. The landlord must then make a full planning application and take their chances against the council’s local HMO policies.

That does not amount to an outright ban, at least not on paper.

In practice, some councils impose concentration limits that make it extremely difficult to secure permission once an arbitrary percentage has already been reached within a street or prescribed radius.

Apparently, a well-designed HMO providing six good-quality rooms can be acceptable on one side of an invisible line but unacceptable on the other because a council spreadsheet says there are already too many.

The tenants who might have occupied those rooms still need somewhere to live, of course, but that does not appear to feature prominently in the calculation.

Article 4 Directions were supposed to allow councils to deal with evidenced local problems. Increasingly, we are seeing them applied across very large areas, sometimes covering an entire town or borough.

That may be administratively convenient, but convenience is not the same as good housing policy.

If the problem is concentrated within a handful of streets, target those streets. Do not make the creation of lawful shared housing more difficult everywhere and then express surprise when rents rise or people end up in less suitable accommodation.

Landlords cannot afford to buy first and investigate later

From a landlord’s perspective, this has made planning due diligence a fundamental part of the commercial appraisal.

It is no longer enough to find a large house, calculate the room rents, obtain a refurbishment quotation and assume the numbers work.

Before exchanging contracts, the buyer needs to know whether the property is already within an Article 4 area, whether a new direction has been proposed and what the council’s local HMO policies actually say.

They also need to establish the property’s current lawful planning use.

This is particularly important where a property is being sold as an existing HMO. A licence is not the same as planning permission, and the fact that tenants have occupied the property for several years does not automatically mean the owner can prove its lawful use when challenged.

As I explained in When is an HMO not an HMO?, the issue often emerges when the landlord tries to sell or refinance.

The buyer’s solicitor asks for evidence of lawful HMO use. The lender asks the same question. Suddenly, everybody discovers that the licence, council tax records and old letting adverts do not necessarily provide the certainty they expected.

A landlord who can demonstrate that the property was already being used lawfully as a C4 HMO before an Article 4 Direction took effect may be in a very different position from somebody trying to create a new HMO today.

That distinction can affect the property’s value, mortgageability and saleability.

Restrictions may increase the value of existing lawful HMOs

There is an obvious commercial consequence whenever councils restrict new supply.

Existing lawful HMOs may become more valuable because competitors cannot easily create more of them. Demand for rooms continues, but the planning system limits the number of new rooms that can be brought to market.

That can create scarcity value, but only where the property’s planning and licensing position is clean and capable of being evidenced.

An established HMO with a clear planning history, proper licensing, sensible management records and evidence of continuous use may become an increasingly valuable asset.

An HMO bought on assumptions, with missing records and no certainty over lawful use, could become an expensive problem.

That is why landlords should not regard planning as something for the solicitor to look at shortly before completion. It should be investigated before the purchase price is agreed, because the planning position directly affects what the property can earn and what it may eventually be worth.

Refuse the bad HMOs, not the people who need them

Nobody is suggesting that councils should approve every HMO application.

Conversions that create dangerous layouts, inadequate facilities, unacceptable overcrowding or genuine harm to neighbours should be rejected. Rogue landlords should also face robust enforcement.

However, that is not an argument for treating shared housing itself as the problem.

Britain has a shortage of affordable homes. Self-contained rents are beyond the reach of a growing number of people, social housing waiting lists are enormous and councils are already spending extraordinary sums on temporary accommodation.

Against that background, making professionally managed shared housing more difficult to provide looks less like joined-up policy and more like one department passing the problem to another.

A planning committee can vote against an HMO. It cannot vote away the tenant who would have lived there.

Reject the bad conversions. Prosecute the rogues. But stop pretending that refusing lawful HMO accommodation amounts to solving a housing problem.

The tenants still need somewhere to live.

Where exactly do councils expect them to go?

Are HMO applications being refused in your area despite obvious demand for affordable rooms? Has Article 4 affected the value, purchase or refinancing of one of your properties? Please share your experiences in the comments below.

The post HMO planning refusals have doubled – where are tenants supposed to live appeared first on Property118.

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Aug

28

0

Letting agent enforcement must improve – safeagent

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Letting agent enforcement must improve – safeagent

The UK’s largest not-for-profit accreditation scheme for lettings and management agents is calling for tougher enforcement after one firm was accused of failing to return deposits to more than 100 tenants.

Safeagent made the demand after the allegations were reported by BBC News and it acknowledged the workload facing trading standards officers responsible for enforcing housing legislation.

It added that many authorities successfully pursue reported compliance failures, particularly where an agent may not belong to a client money protection or redress scheme.

Tenants placed at risk

The chief executive of safeagent, Isobel Thomson, said: “As an organisation, we have experienced instances of authorities pitching responsibility from one to the other, as appears to have happened in this case, where issues are raised regarding letting agent compliance.

“The end result is that no action is taken and consumers are placed at risk.”

She added: “We have experienced authorities failing to respond to repeated communications about agents displaying the safeagent logo, for example, as they cannot see the bigger picture of what that means for consumers i.e. that the firm is not part of a CMP Scheme or very likely a redress scheme either.

“It is not a vanity project about the use of our logo but a genuine aim of ensuring consumers are protected.”

Compliance checks questioned

Safeagent said reports of unprotected deposits should have prompted checks on whether the firm met other basic requirements, including membership of a client money protection scheme.

It also points to the National Trading Standards Property Agent Checker, which allows searches to be made for an agent’s compliance status.

The organisation also questioned whether the number of consumer reports should have led to an escalation to the National Trading Standards Letting Agency Team.

It also asked what action the national team had taken.

Budget cuts restrict enforcement

One trading standards authority told safeagent that significant budget cuts had reduced its capacity and forced it to prioritise action against set criteria.

It said misuse of logos alone no longer met its threshold, with its focus shifted towards vulnerable consumers who had been specifically targeted.

The number of complaints and detriment were also considered, while intelligence would be recorded and passed to the national letting agency team.

Safeagent is now calling on the government to ensure authorities understand the purpose of enforcement, saying a lack of joined-up action did not serve consumers well.

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L&G’s reported two-year licensing gap: could tenants really reclaim £15m?

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L&G’s reported two-year licensing gap: could tenants really reclaim £15m?

A letter from Lewisham Council says the licensing application for one tenant’s home was submitted 744 days after the council’s selective licensing scheme began. Reports suggest another 314 applications connected with the same Legal & General development remain pending.

That is the striking fact behind claims that L&G could be facing a rent repayment and civil penalty exposure running beyond £15 million. However, there is an important distinction between a frightening calculation and an actual bill.

At present, I can find no published tribunal application, Rent Repayment Order, civil penalty notice or finding that L&G has committed an offence. What we appear to have is a potentially serious licensing failure, hundreds of tenants who may have grounds to bring individual claims and some extremely speculative arithmetic.

What appears to have happened?

Lewisham Council’s selective licensing scheme came into force on 1 July 2024. Applications opened on 20 May 2024 and landlords were offered an early-bird discount, so this was not a scheme introduced without warning.

A council letter dated 10 August 2026, subsequently published by the Lewisham Letter, told a tenant at the Bale & Anchor development that the licensing application for their home had been made on 15 July 2026. The council said the landlord should have held a licence from 1 July 2024 and invited the tenant to consider applying for a Rent Repayment Order.

That is a gap of 744 days.

Inside Housing Living has reported that 315 properties operated by L&G had licensing applications pending. It also reported that Lewisham Council had been unable to identify an application for the development as recently as 27 March 2026.

L&G’s response was that managing agent Urbanbubble had delegated responsibility for licensing and had been engaging with the council since 2024. It said applications had now been made for all relevant properties and remained pending. Urbanbubble did not provide a comment to Inside Housing.

A licensing delay or an application delay?

This distinction matters. Calling this a dispute about “licensing delays” risks giving landlords the wrong impression.

Under section 95 of the Housing Act 2004, a landlord has a defence once a valid licensing application has been duly made. In other words, a landlord is not ordinarily committing an offence simply because the council takes months to process the application.

The critical allegation here is that valid applications were not submitted until July 2026, nearly two years after the scheme began. If that is correct, blaming the length of the council’s processing queue would miss the point.

There may still be facts that have not entered the public domain. For example, L&G or Urbanbubble might produce evidence of earlier applications, incorrect council guidance, failed payment attempts or technical problems with the application system. Those details could make an enormous difference. On the currently published facts, however, the concern is not that licences took too long to issue. It is that the applications may have been made too late.

Where does the £15 million figure come from?

One tenant reportedly pays £1,820 a month. Multiplying that rent by 12 months and approximately 300 flats produces £6.55 million. Using all 315 reported applications would produce £6.88 million.

A further £9 million has apparently been added by multiplying 300 properties by the former maximum civil penalty of £30,000. Combining those two figures creates the eye-catching claim that the total exposure could exceed £15 million.

What the £15 million figure assumes

Approximately 300 qualifying and occupied tenancies;
every tenant bringing a claim;
each claim being made within the applicable time limit;
the correct L&G entity being the immediate landlord;
no successful reasonable-excuse defence;
the tribunal awarding 100% of the relevant rent; and
Lewisham imposing the maximum civil penalty on every property.

None of that has happened. Rent Repayment Orders are made following individual applications to the First-tier Tribunal. They are not a class action and an award is not automatically equal to 12 months’ rent. The tribunal considers the landlord’s conduct, the tenant’s conduct, the landlord’s financial circumstances and other relevant factors.

Civil penalties are a separate enforcement tool available to the council. They are not rent repaid to tenants and should not be presented as part of a single “rent repayment bill”. The maximum civil penalty increased from £30,000 to £40,000 from 1 May 2026 for relevant offences committed under the new provisions, although the correct cap for conduct spanning that date would require case-specific legal analysis.

The £15 million figure is therefore not an amount L&G has been ordered to pay. It is a combination of hypothetical tenant awards and hypothetical maximum council penalties.

Could the Renters’ Rights Act increase the claims?

There is a further complication that deserves more attention than the headline arithmetic. Changes introduced from 1 May 2026 increased the potential Rent Repayment Order period from 12 months to 24 months.

Government guidance on the transition indicates that the old rules continue to apply to the part of an ongoing offence committed before 1 May 2026, with the new rules applying to the later period.

For a tenant who had occupied throughout the alleged licensing failure, that could create a potential claim period covering up to 12 months under the old rules, plus the period between 1 May and the date on which a valid application was made. If 15 July 2026 was the application date, the alleged offence would normally have ended on 14 July because the application day itself is protected.

That does not mean every tenant can recover that entire amount. Occupancy dates, rent paid, benefits received, the identity of the contractual landlord and the tribunal’s assessment would all affect the result. There also appears to be no reported appellate decision dealing with this precise transitional calculation, so it would be unwise to present any aggregate number as settled.

Can a corporate landlord blame its managing agent?

This may become the most important issue for other landlords. L&G says Urbanbubble had delegated responsibility for obtaining the licences. However, appointing a managing agent does not automatically give a landlord a reasonable-excuse defence.

In Aytan v Moore [2022] UKUT 27 (LC), the Upper Tribunal explained that a landlord relying on an agent would need to establish the scope of the agent’s contractual responsibility, that reliance was reasonable and why the landlord could not reasonably have kept itself informed.

An even closer comparison can be found in LDC (Ferry Lane) GP3 Ltd v Garro [2024] UKUT 40 (LC). That case involved a large institutional landlord within the Unite group and an additional licensing scheme affecting 221 HMOs. The Upper Tribunal rejected the landlord’s reasonable-excuse argument and made the practical point that a substantial professional landlord should have systems capable of identifying licensing requirements.

Six tenants in that case received just over £23,000 between them, based on 50% of the relevant net rent. That alone demonstrates why multiplying every tenancy by 100% of the maximum possible award is not a reliable forecast. It also shows that sophisticated corporate ownership does not lower the compliance standard. If anything, the tribunal may expect stronger systems and oversight.

How many L&G properties are actually involved?

The numbers being reported also need untangling. Developer Watkin Jones says the two L&G build-to-rent blocks at Bale & Anchor contain 322 homes: 138 completed in 2023 and a further 184 completed in March 2024.

Some references describe the wider development as containing 365 homes. That number includes a separate block of 43 affordable homes sold to the CBRE UK Affordable Housing Fund. It should not automatically be included in calculations concerning L&G.

We are therefore left with 322 L&G homes, 315 reportedly pending applications and no public explanation for the seven-property difference. Nor do we know how many of the 315 homes were occupied throughout the relevant periods or which company appears as landlord on each tenancy agreement.

That last point could prove critical because a Rent Repayment Order is generally pursued against the tenant’s immediate landlord, not simply whichever corporate brand appears above the development.

The real lesson for landlords

Whether the eventual exposure is £500,000, £5 million or nothing at all, this story has already exposed a compliance weakness that affects landlords of every size.

Delegating licensing to an agent is perfectly reasonable. Delegating it and never checking whether the application, supporting documents and fee were actually received is something else entirely.

A landlord’s compliance record should identify every property, every applicable licensing scheme, the application deadline, submission confirmation, payment receipt, licence conditions and renewal date. Someone within the landlord’s own organisation should verify that evidence rather than relying on an email saying the matter is “in hand”.

If a business with more than £4 billion invested in build-to-rent and over 10,000 apartments can reportedly find itself facing questions over hundreds of licence applications, smaller landlords should not assume this is merely a corporate embarrassment with no relevance to them.

The £15 million headline may be premature, but the underlying question is entirely legitimate: who was checking that the applications had actually been made?

What do you think? Should appointing a professional managing agent protect a landlord where licensing applications are submitted late, or should the landlord always be expected to verify that the job has been completed? Please share your views in the comments below.

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Why selling with tenants puts landlords in a stronger position

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Why selling with tenants puts landlords in a stronger position

An empty property can put pressure on you to accept the next offer. A tenanted property keeps earning while you find the right buyer, and that buyer could even be your tenant with our help to make it possible.

Traditionally, many landlords wanting to sell have rushed out to get vacant possession, tidy the property up and put it on the open market in pursuit of the highest possible price.

But with landlords using Section 8 to sell potentially facing 12 months or more with an empty property after gaining vacant possession, and others looking for a faster alternative to waiting for possession proceedings, a growing number are deciding that squeezing every last pound from a property isn’t necessarily the same as achieving the best outcome.

That can remove months of uncertainty, the possibility of court delays and the risk that repairs, refurbishment or other unexpected costs start eating into the extra money you hoped vacant possession would produce.

While they make up a much smaller percentage of property buyers, Hamptons recently reported investors account for over 14% of all transactions in July – a key indicator that owner occupiers are more hesitant in the current market.

Many are looking for turnkey opportunities – keenly priced properties with established tenancies they can simply take over, so they collect rent from the start. Sellers who evict their tenants and speculate to accumulate may find they have made their properties less attractive to the most prolific buyers.

Perhaps though most importantly in a buyers’ market, a tenanted property can allow you to sell from a position of strength.

You’re not standing over an empty property watching another month’s costs disappear from your bank account while a buyer chips away at the price.

The property is still doing its job. Rent is still coming in and you can decide whether an offer is good enough. You’re not under the same pressure to sell quickly if the alternative is running empty property draining your cash flow for 12 months+

That choice strengthens your position as a seller.

Of course, as Rightmove and Zoopla have recently reported, sellers who do not want a sale to drag on for months or years must be realistic about the price and data from Hamptons saying 56% of investor offers were at least 10% below the asking price, support that message.

However, when you consider Zoopla recently reported that the average discount across all sales is 3.5%, the difference in price for a faster sale with significantly fewer costs and less risks is more like 6.5%

Offset that against the advantages of keeping tenants in place and collecting rent through the majority of the sales process as well as the costs you save – on redecorating, replacing worn fixtures and fittings, running empty property with council tax, insurance, utilities, security and mortgage payments coming out every month with no rent coming in – and it’s easy to see why so many landlords are choosing to relinquish some of the equity they have built up in their properties for a fast sale.

Anyone who invests in stocks and shares knows the danger of waiting for the “perfect moment” to sell. Once you’ve decided an investment no longer fits your plans, focusing on what it was once worth can keep you holding on long after you’ve decided you’d rather be out. And it can lead to much bigger losses down the line.

If an investment has increased several times over in value, the difference between extracting every last percentage point and having the money safely in the bank can become much less important.

We sell properties for 85 – 90% of their open market value. Where possible, we sell without disturbing tenants and use the equity to attract chain-free investors who can complete 56 days but, where necessary, we also use it to help tenants so that they are happy to surrender possession rather than be chased through the courts. We take our fee from it, pay the solicitors of your choice from our list of approved, independent panel solicitors and it covers all other costs like EPC certificates, listing materials etc so there are no other costs on top of that.

Of course, there’s nothing stopping sellers negotiating with buyers and tenants themselves to secure a faster sale and voluntary surrender. But that’s not all we do.

We have a database of 30,000+ active buyers (in addition to the buyers we find advertising on Rightmove, Zoopla and through local agents) including owner-occupiers, incoming landlords, private investors and conglomerate corporations
We collect all the information buyers and their solicitors need before they can legally complete on a transfer of landlord so your solicitors don’t have to and nothing is left to chance before a sale is agreed
We check compliance and correct any oversight before it becomes a problem
We secure buyers and in doing so, we cut the rate of landlord sales that fail from 51% (according to Hamptons data) to less than 5%
We have teams of experts at our disposal to react to any issue uncovered in the process and oversee every stage from listing to completion to ensure everyone involved completes their task efficiently and the process is moved to the next stage with minimum delay

In short, finding a buyer is just the start of what we do. A huge part of the value we offer seller is in what we do after a sale is agreed to, make sure it is completed efficiently and on time.

Take a property worth £250,000. Accepting £225,000 might initially feel like giving up £25,000 of hard-earned equity.

But £25,000 isn’t necessarily the true difference between the two options. Pursuing the full vacant-possession value can mean paying for possession, lost rent, council tax, insurance, utilities, preparing the property for sale, estate agency and legal fees. Over a sale taking 10 months or more, those costs can easily reach £15,000–£20,000.

Suddenly, the difference between what ultimately reaches your bank account can be much smaller than the difference between the two headline prices – and you’re comparing two very different levels of service, risk and involvement.

With Landlord Sales Agency, you agree the amount you’re happy to receive. We then use our experience, buyer network and different routes to market to achieve more, taking our costs from the difference. In return, we manage the tenants, buyers, compliance, solicitors and sales progression and solve the problems that might otherwise delay or derail the sale.

For landlords who have already done well from a property that may no longer be right for their portfolio, equity they can use can be worth considerably more than a little extra equity tied up in a property they no longer want.

That is particularly true if an older property is approaching a period when maintenance, energy-efficiency improvements or changing compliance requirements will demand further investment.

Doing nothing isn’t necessarily the cost-free option. The question is whether the next £10,000, £20,000 or £30,000 is best invested in that property – or whether the equity already sitting in it could work harder somewhere else.

That’s really what selling from a position of strength means: not being dependent on one buyer, one route to market or one outcome.

You have choices – and because the property is still generating rent, you have the time and income to choose the one that works best for you.

Don’t wait until an empty property, rising costs or a deadline takes those choices away. Contact Landlord Sales Agency while you’re still in a position to choose how, when and to whom you sell.