Tenants, landlords and confidence - a virtuous circle

Introduction

At this time of profound change for the sector, what factors explain why some landlords are confident about the future of the PRS and why some are contemplating their futures in the PRS? One key determinant of landlord confidence are the tenants.

This blog post looks at the importance of tenants in determining landlord confidence. It focuses on the link between the two topics: confidence and tenant.

A quick reminder: measuring confidence and sentiment

Our quarterly research publication – Landlord Eye – reports on the NRLA’s consultations with members. The NRLA (and before that the RLA) have collected data on landlord confidence since 2019. By the end of 2025, the Landlord Confidence Index (LCI) showed a large fall after a slow but steady post- 2024 General Election recovery

Confidence is a metric based on responses to a single question “tick box” response – 'are landlords “more confident” or “less confident” about the future' than they were three months ago.

Sentiment however is somewhat different: The NRLA research team use the comments landlords take the time to write in consultations to provide an analysis of sentiment via a Large Language Model (LLM)  - see this article for more details.

Chart 2 below shows the steady ebbing away of landlord sentiment through 2025:

Closer analysis of “more” and “less” confident landlords

The use of a standard statistics-based approach to compare the two groups is impossible - the more confident group are simply too few to break down results and conduct a meaningful statistical analysis: just 86 people out of a sample of 1,530 (5.6%) stated they were more confident in Qtr 4 than they were in Qtr 3.

However, our use of the Large Language Model does allow NRLA researchers to benchmark and compare views of both groups against our databank of more than 1m NRLA-member landlord sentences. The NRLA has collected these comments in member surveys and consultations.

The table below shows the divide between landlords who replied they were feeling less confident and the much smaller group who stated they were feeling more confident:

Note that the NRLA undertook the fieldwork immediately prior to the Renters’ Rights Bill becoming the Renters’ Rights Act (in time the NRLA will merge these topics).

In Table 1 above, “Tenant management” encompasses a wide range of day-to-day topics, includes tenant screening, the sign-up stage and then the tenant-exit process. It also includes dealing with property issues raised by tenants, and neighbour complaints about their tenants.

“Tenant relationships” is a summary term which captures more general comments landlords give about their relationship with the tenant. 
Analysis of Table 1 highlights differences between “more confident” and “less confident” landlords: 

1. Firstly, the “more confident” landlords express a higher sentiment (even though it remains below 50) across each of the listed topics. Those landlords with more positive comments about their relationship with their current tenants are also much more “confident” in a wider sense: They are more positive about their prospects in the PRS.
2. Note too that in Table 1 tenant relationships are a more frequently quoted topic (in percentage terms) by those landlords “more confident”. 
3. This same group talk also about relationships more often (where it is the 4th most common topic) and more favourably (comparing sentiment score) than the less confident landlord group.
4. Meanwhile those landlords less confident are far less likely to talk about “relationships” and more likely to talk – and talk less favourably - about tenant-centred “issues”: 
   • Just 13% of less confident landlords mention "relationships" at all - making it the tenth most common topic for this group – compared to 31% of the same group who raise tenant management issues.

Chart 3 below summarises the difference in sentiment scores between the more confident and less confident groups as outlined in Table 1.

The chart highlights how the difference between the two groups is greatest when discussing tenant related issues. This difference is greatest when landlords choose to talk about the relationship they have with their tenants:

Note that evidence from tenant surveys reflects the importance of landlord-tenant relationships. In these surveys, tenants regularly give independent landlords the highest satisfaction grades compared to other models of renting. These tenant surveys consistently evidence the link between independent landlords and landlord-tenant relationships.

Summary

Do some landlords have a more positive outlook on the sector because of the time they have invested in developing tenant relationships? Or are those landlords who are more positive about the sector anyway, incidentally more positive across a range of individual issues – including current tenants?

Research may never resolve this chicken-or-egg causality debate, and anyway might be irrelevant. What is important however, is that a correlation exists (in a non-statistical sense) between a landlord’s confidence and their own tenant-based experiences. These experiences being based on the approach landlords take to tenant management, and in developing tenant relationships.

With the now-imminent arrival of the Renters’ Rights Act, day-to-day tenant management and the building of tenant relationships will become even more crucial to a landlord’s business planning and all-important tenant retention strategies. Getting this right is clearly key to improving landlord confidence and business sustainability in the long term.