Selling a rental in 2026: why landlord-to-landlord is the most expensive way to do it

If you are selling a buy-to-let this autumn, the most likely buyer knocking on the door is another landlord, and they are arriving with a calculator, a list of everything wrong with the property, and an offer 10% under what you asked for. That is not cynicism. It is what the numbers say.

Hamptons' analysis of July 2026 sales, drawn from Connells Group data, found that landlords paid an average of 88.7% of the initial asking price, and that 56% of investor offers came in at least 10% below asking. That was up from 45% a year earlier. First-time buyers and home movers were nowhere near as aggressive: 25% and 27% of their offers were pitched that low. Sellers are starting to accept it, too. 27% of those heavily discounted investor offers were accepted in July, up from 18% in July 2025, and for flats the acceptance rate was 41%. In the South East, seven in ten investor bids were at least 10% under the asking price.

So the "landlord discount" is real, it is widening, and it is landing hardest on exactly the stock most private landlords are selling: flats, tenanted houses and homes that have had ten years of tenants and not much else.

Why the discount exists

Three things are stacking up against the landlord seller this year.

Supply. Rightmove's August index reported a 12-year high in the number of homes for sale for the time of year, with London offering buyers the largest choice since 2010, and buying activity still 10% below last year. Zoopla's August figures tell the same story from a different angle: 5% more homes on the market than a year ago while sales agreed are 6% lower. Into that market, landlords have been feeding stock steadily. Hamptons found 9.2% of homes listed for sale in June had been advertised to rent in the previous five years. In London it was one in five.

Buyers who price by yield, not by love. Landlords are buying again: Hamptons put investors at 14.1% of purchases in July, having reported earlier in the year that the landlord share of purchases was at its highest since 2016, with a record 23% of the homes they bought having been let by the previous owner. That sounds like good news for sellers until you look at how they buy. An investor values your flat on the rent it produces, the refurbishment it needs and the stamp duty surcharge they will pay, then works backwards. Sentiment does not enter into it. A first-time buyer picturing their first Christmas in the place is a fundamentally different negotiation.

Condition. The "doer-upper" has lost its shine. LRG's Q2 2026 survey of more than 700 buyers and sellers found only 6% actively looking for a property needing significant work, and 53% saying they would not take on a major renovation at all. The rest were only interested "where the asking price genuinely reflects the work involved", which is a polite way of saying they want the discount too.

Put those together and you can see how a tired, tenanted two-bed ends up marketed as "investment only", viewed by three landlords, and sold for 12% under what the agent said it was worth. Hamptons estimates that 51% of homes landlords put up for sale in 2025 never sold at all, rising to 60% for flats. Many of those were priced for one audience and shown to another.

Where the demand actually is

The buyers paying closest to asking price are owner-occupiers. Zoopla estimated first-time buyers made up 39% of all sales in 2025 and expects them to be the largest buyer group again in 2026; Connells' January data put them at 48% of sales in London. A large share of the country's one and two-bedroom rental stock is exactly what those buyers want, and they will generally pay more for it than a landlord will, provided the property is presented as a home rather than as a yield.

Our own data makes the point sharply. Across all offers accepted on Flyp marketplace sales where we know the buyer type, 79% came from first-time buyers, 15% from home movers and just 6% from buy-to-let investors. Former rentals do not have to be sold to landlords. They usually should not be.

Six things to do differently when selling a rental

1. Decide who the buyer is before you decide the price. If the property can realistically be sold with vacant possession, or with a tenant who is moving anyway, price and present it for an owner-occupier. If it genuinely can only be sold tenanted, price it as an investment from day one and go after several investors at once. The costly middle ground is an "investment only" listing at an owner-occupier price.

2. Make the tenant an ally, not an obstacle. Most tenanted sales stall on access. Agree viewing windows in writing, offer something in return (a rent reduction for the marketing period, a contribution to moving costs, a good reference), and give one point of contact rather than four agents each ringing the tenant. A tenanted house that can be viewed on a Saturday morning is worth materially more than one that can be viewed by appointment with a week's notice. This is the part of a landlord sale we spend most of our time on at Flyp: tenanted sales are a speciality of ours, and a single Flyp coordinator handles every viewing request across every agent so the tenant is only ever dealing with one person.

3. If the property is empty, don't leave it empty. An empty rental costs you rent every month it sits on the market, and an empty, echoing flat does not show well. Flyp's rent-whilst-selling product solves both: we invest in getting the property presentable, place occupants under a licence rather than a tenancy so it can be sold with vacant possession whenever you accept an offer, and manage cleaning and dressing around viewings so every buyer walks into a home that looks lived in and cared for. You keep earning income right up to exchange, and the buyer sees the property at its best.

4. Spend on presentation, not on renovation. Given how few buyers want a project, a deep clean, decluttering, repainting the worst room and replacing a stained carpet will return their cost many times over. A full refurbishment usually will not. Our own transformation work is reserved for homes where the numbers clearly justify it; for most landlord sales, the answer is a weekend's worth of tidying and a decent photographer.

5. Price on evidence, not on the highest valuation. In a market with this much stock, the first two weeks decide the sale. Rightmove's long-standing research is that homes priced correctly at launch are twice as likely to sell as those that need a reduction, and sell in less than half the time. The trap for landlords is instructing the agent who promised the most. Across Flyp sales, the agent who eventually secured the buyer was not the agent who had given the highest valuation 86% of the time.

6. Build an investor pack anyway. Even when you are targeting owner-occupiers, have the rent history, EPC, gas and electrical certificates, deposit protection and tenancy documents ready. It removes the "unknowns" a landlord buyer uses to justify a discount, and it makes a first-time buyer's solicitor faster.

Why more agents beats one agent

The default advice to sellers is still to pick one agent and sign a sole-agency agreement for 12 weeks, sometimes 16 or 20 once notice periods are added. In a buyer's market, that is a long time to find out the valuation was wrong and the applicant list was thin.

Multiple agents work because buyers are not evenly distributed. Each branch has its own registered applicants, its own investors, and its own view of what your property is worth. Across Flyp marketplace sales that reached an accepted offer, an average of 5.7 agents generated viewings per property, 54% of sales attracted two or more offers, and in 43% of them the competing offers came from different agents. The agent who won the sale was not the first agent instructed 76% of the time, and was not the agent who booked the first viewing 70% of the time. Sole agency simply removes those outcomes from the table.

For a landlord seller the effect is doubled. Investor buyers are concentrated in a handful of branches that specialise in them; owner-occupiers are spread across the rest. Running both audiences at once, through agents who are competing with each other rather than waiting out a tie-in, is how you avoid the 10% haircut.

Put a number on that haircut and it stops being abstract. On a £300,000 rental, the difference between the 88.7% of asking that Hamptons says the average landlord buyer pays and the 96% our Plymouth seller achieved is around £22,000. On a £450,000 London flat, it is closer to £33,000. That is money one agent, working alone with one pool of buyers, can very easily leave on the table without ever knowing it was there, because they never saw the offer the agent down the road would have brought. The only way to know is to have both agents working the property at the same time.

The reason most sellers don't do this is cost: multi-agency has traditionally meant paying 2.5% to 3.5%, which wipes out most of the gain. Flyp's model exists to remove that trade-off. We are selling hundreds of homes at any one time through a network of thousands of agents, and because those agents receive a steady flow of instructions from us rather than having to win each one, they work for less than their normal rate. The result is that you get three or four agents competing on your property for a single sole-agency-equivalent fee, with no lock-in and the underperformers rotated out every few weeks.

Three NRLA members who did it this year

A tenanted four-bedroom house in Clacton-on-Sea. The tenant needed to be present at every viewing, so access had to be tightly managed. Four agents were instructed at £200,000 in mid-July. Eight viewings produced three offers within a fortnight, all from investors, two at £190,000 and one at the full asking price. Because the buyers were competing, the "tenanted discount" never materialised: the sale was agreed at £200,000 seventeen days after launch.

A tenanted five-bedroom house in Plymouth. The first five viewings were cancelled because of the tenants, the kind of start that usually ends in a price cut. With four agents engaged, the momentum was kept up until access was sorted; twenty viewings later a home mover, not an investor, agreed £240,000 against a £250,000 asking price. That is 96% of asking, against the 88.7% Hamptons says the average landlord buyer pays.

A two-bedroom home in Camberley. Five agents valued it, at an average of £368,000; it was launched at £375,000 across the Flyp agent network. Twenty-three viewings produced four offers from three different agents, and a first-time buyer's offer of £362,000 was accepted nine days after launch. It completed in June.

None of those sellers did anything exotic. They put the property in front of more buyers at once, managed the tenant situation properly, and let competition set the price.

About Flyp

Flyp is a sales marketplace built for exactly this kind of sale. Instead of one agent on a tie-in, your property is marketed by several of the best local agents at the same time, competing for the buyer, for a single sole-agency-equivalent fee and with no lock-in; agents who are not performing are rotated out. We sell hundreds of homes at once through a network of thousands of agents, and we have become specialists in the awkward end of the market: tenanted properties, tired properties and empty ones. Where a property is empty, our rent-whilst-selling product invests in getting it presentable, places occupants on a licence so it can still be sold with vacant possession, and manages cleaning and dressing so viewings are flawless and you keep earning until exchange. The aim is simple: the best price the whole market will pay, not the price one agent happened to find.

NRLA members receive a free home sale health assessment and a 40% discount on the upfront marketplace fee, refundable if agents are not secured within 14 days. Find out more at flyp.co/nrla.

Sources

Hamptons / Connells Group, "Buy-to-let investors driving harder bargains as housing market cools", 17 August 2026 (via Property Reporter). Hamptons, "Investor purchases rise as landlords buy from other landlords", May 2026. Hamptons, "Pace of landlord sales is slowing", 13 July 2026 (via The Negotiator). Rightmove House Price Index, 17 August 2026. Zoopla House Price Index, 27 August 2026; Zoopla, 19 December 2025. LRG buyer and seller survey, Q2 2026 (via Landlord Today, 4 July 2026). Connells Group first-time buyer data, January 2026. Rightmove, "Sellers twice as likely to sell if priced right first time", 2020. HomeOwners Alliance, estate agent contract guidance, June 2026. Flyp marketplace data, 388 sales reaching accepted offer, to September 2026; buyer type known on 243.