Hostility towards landlords - reshaping the PRS?
Summary
Tenant groups, politicians, and the media are portraying landlords in a negative light. Inevitably, the way in which these groups perpetuate a stereotype of landlords weighs down landlord confidence.
The sense of a “hostile environment” within which landlords are working could even be a motivation behind selling portfolios and leaving the market altogether.
NRLA analysis highlights three key points:
- The topic of “views towards landlords” is one which consistently generates lower sentiment scores than the overall measure.
- The topic is generating an increasing proportion of comments among landlords and is moving up landlords’ own agenda compared to other topics.
- There is evidence that for those landlords looking for a medium-term exit, one motivation to leave (even if it is not a dominant factor) is the negativity surrounding their role in the housing market.
Introduction
This post looks at the comments and observations landlords have made over the last eighteen months on the issue of the portrayal of landlords in the media, by politicians, campaign groups, as well as the wider public.
It reveals an increasingly stressed landlord community, who feel they are becoming a convenient scapegoat for many of the housing problems facing England & Wales today.
Methodology: The Landlord Confidence Index
Each quarter the NRLA undertake a consultation exercise with members. In Quarter 2 over 900 landlords took part.
Part of the consultation involves “taking the temperature” of landlord opinion - an analysis of which the NRLA publishes in our Landlord Confidence Index.
NRLA researchers take the [anonymised] comments landlords make and use an AI-based analytical tool developed by our partners Wordnerds, to better understand those comments.
We are now able to classify and track landlord comments over time. This gives us vital insight on the changing sentiment towards individual topics and issues among landlords. It also means researchers can track the relative importance of topics against each other.
For more details of the fundamentals of the analysis, see this post.
Views towards landlords
When the NRLA ask landlords why their confidence is either up or down in any given quarter, those landlords will often refer to the “media” and/or “politicians”.
To find out more, NRLA Research trained the AI software tool Wordnerds to look specifically for these and similar references.
It is important to note that we deliberately exclude individual ‘tenant relationships’ here – this is all about external perceptions of ‘landlords’ – the media, politicians, policy makers, government. It does include tenant campaign groups, but not landlord relationships with their own tenants - this is analysed separately.
Sentiment score
The chart below shows the sentiment score for “Views towards landlords” and compares the score for this specific topic to overall sentiment for each quarter:
Chart 1: Sentiment scores for "Views towards landlords"
The results show that, on this topic, sentiment lags the overall scores, and lags by some margin. Sentiment, whilst there is some improvement, the score remains is lower than twelve months ago.
Note the lower score between 2026 Qtr2 compared to the corresponding quarter of 2025 does not mean hostility towards landlords is increasing per se. But it does mean landlords are more frustrated and upset by the rhetoric now than they were this time last year.
Volume of discussion
The chart above showed evidence in support of the hypothesis landlords are becoming increasingly frustrated by the hostile environment they are working in.
Chart 2 below meanwhile shows how landlords are increasingly discussing this topic. It shows the percentage share of all comments on all topics this specific issue generates each quarter:
Chart 2: Views towards landlords - a topic being increasingly discussed
The chart shows how this topic is becoming increasingly important to landlords. The volume of comments related to the portrayal of landlords in the media and stakeholders has proportionately doubled since the start of 2025 (when we first began using this analytical tool).
Using the same tool we can identify ‘typical’ landlord responses when the NRLA ask landlords for the reasons underpinning their current levels of confidence in the PRS:
I don't think the Renters Rights Act is a bad thing. But I believe the media has made it a negative and scary prospect for private landlords.
Feels like I’m being squeezed from all sides.
The increasing importance of the topic: more evidence
So, the above shows disillusionment with the debate, and some evidence that landlords are increasingly discussing this topic. Chart 3 provides more evidence of how this topic is becoming more important to landlords compared to other topics:
Chart 3: An increasingly important topic
The chart shows the where the topic stands in the ‘league table’ of importance. In the first Landlord Eye, “Views towards landlords” was the eighth most discussed topic. In the most recent edition, it has climbed to be the fourth most discussed topic.
The topic’s climb up the league table underscores the proportionate increased ‘bandwidth’ of the conversation discussed in Chart 2.
This quarter is the first time the issue has been so “highly rated” as measured by both sentiment and volume, underlining its emergence.
Persecution by an ill-informed government and activists who think all landlords are bad and have lots of money. Very wrong on all accounts.
Successive governments for the past twenty years have increasingly disliked small landlords…yet many good landlords fulfil a strong social role that goes unrecognised.
Impact on landlord behaviour
Finally, is there a linkage between the tone of the debate around landlords and a landlord’s desire to quit the sector?
The NRLA asks landlords whether they plan to be a landlord “at the end of the next calendar year" (so in 2025 the NRLA asked landlords about their likely position at the end of 2026, now landlords are being asked in 2026 about the likelihood of exit in 2027).
Consider the data below, here split between those ‘likely to remain’ a landlord at the end of 2027 and those who see themselves as ‘unlikely’ to be in the sector at this date:
Table 1: How the conversation divides, and unites, landlords
What the table shows, is that the nature of the conversation is the same whether a landlord is planning to either leave the PRS or remain. So it is not the case that only landlords planning to leave the sector perceive an issue with their characterisation - landlords are equally aware and unhappy with their media & stakeholder representation irrespective of their stated intention to leave.
That said the table highlights clear differences elsewhere. In volume terms, landlords planning to leave discuss this topic with greater relative frequency. Landlords planning to leave the sector also give this issue a higher ranking in the ‘league table’ of topics they raise.
Summary
The analysis of landlords' comments highlights that, for many, there is a sense of being unfairly perceived and scapegoated by the media, by politicians, by campaign groups, and ultimately, by the wider public.
This itself does not seem to be pushing landlords out of the PRS. But for many landlords, escaping the toxicity is certainly one factor in the “debit column” when deciding to leave or remain in the sector.
Policy is, unfortunately, combining with rhetoric in a way landlords are finding at best unfair and at worst, hostile.
