The Housing Crisis Nobody's Actually Fixing: Where Hull Tenants and Landlords Stand

There's a lot of noise around the housing crisis, and most of it talks past the people actually living through it, tenants trying to find somewhere affordable, and landlords trying to work out whether staying in the market still makes sense. Here's a straighter look at what's actually happening, and why the government's own proposed fixes don't quite close the gap.

Private Landlords Are Leaving, and Nothing Is Replacing Them at the Same Pace

Roughly 850,000 traditional buy to let properties have disappeared from the private rented sector over the past decade, with the pace picking up around the time of the Renters' Rights Act. Tax changes, higher compliance costs, and the sheer amount of regulation to keep on top of have made self-managing, or even professionally managing, a single rental property feel like far more work than it used to for a diminishing return.

The properties leaving the sector aren't being replaced one for one by anything else. Some are sold to owner-occupiers, which removes them from the rental pool entirely. Others are absorbed into larger institutional portfolios. Either way, the number of individual, small-scale private landlords, historically the backbone of the UK's rental supply, keeps shrinking.

Social Housing Was Supposed to Be the Safety Net. It Isn't Keeping Up.

With fewer private rentals available, more people are pushed toward social housing, exactly the system that's least able to absorb them. Over 1.3 million households are currently on social housing waiting lists in England. Only around 12,198 social homes were built last year, roughly 110 households waiting for every new social home delivered. In some parts of the country, waiting times for a family-sized social home now stretch beyond a hundred years.

The government has committed to building 300,000 new social and affordable homes, with 180,000 earmarked specifically for social rent, as part of a wider target of 1.5 million homes by 2029. Even if that target is hit in full, it's a fraction of the current shortfall, and it does nothing for the people waiting right now.

The Result: More Demand Chasing Fewer Private Rentals, and Prices Follow

Put those two things together, fewer private landlords, and a social housing system that can't absorb the overflow, and the private rented sector ends up carrying weight it was never designed to carry alone. More tenants competing for fewer available properties pushes rents up, on top of ordinary inflation already doing the same thing.

Build to Rent Isn't the Cheaper Alternative It's Sometimes Presented As

One of the government's proposed solutions is encouraging more institutional Build to Rent development, large-scale, professionally managed rental blocks built specifically to let rather than sell. In principle, more supply should ease pressure on prices. In practice, Build to Rent properties carry a real premium over the wider private rented sector, averaging around 12.3% higher rent in 2025, nearly double the 6.5% premium recorded back in 2016. That gap has been widening, not closing.

So while Build to Rent does add new supply, it isn't necessarily supply at a price point that helps the tenants most squeezed by the current shortage. For many, if Build to Rent isn't affordable, the fallback is the same traditional private rented sector that's already shrinking, not an escape from it.

Home Ownership Is the Stated Goal, But the Deposit Trap Works Against It

The other plank of the government's approach is supporting more people into home ownership. That's a reasonable long-term goal, but it runs into an obvious problem: raising a deposit takes time and disposable income, and for a lot of renters, the private rented sector is precisely where they're trying to save that deposit in the first place. Rising rents, driven by the same supply squeeze, eat directly into the money someone would otherwise be putting aside to buy. The system is, in effect, working against its own stated aim in the short term, even if the long-term policy direction is sound.

Students Are Quietly Adding to the Pressure Too

It's easy to overlook, but students are a real part of this picture. Purpose-built student accommodation hasn't kept pace with rising student numbers, with the shortfall in dedicated student beds projected to exceed 600,000 against a UK student population of more than 2 million. Some of that gap is about availability. Some of it is about preference, plenty of students, particularly postgraduates and those in later years, would rather rent a self-contained property than share a room in halls or a large block with strangers.

Either way, the result is the same: more students competing directly with young professionals and families for the same pool of private rental properties, adding further pressure to a market that was already stretched before students entered the equation.

What This Means Locally

None of this is unique to Hull, but Hull isn't immune to it either. As traditional landlords in the city weigh up whether self-managing still makes sense given the compliance load, and as demand from a genuine cross-section of tenants, families, young professionals, and students, continues to compete for the same properties, the fundamentals point toward continued upward pressure on rents locally, alongside continued difficulty for tenants trying to move up into ownership.

For landlords, this isn't really a reason to exit the market, most of the pressure pushing rents upward is structural and isn't going away soon. It is a reason to make sure a property is being managed properly: priced fairly, compliant, and positioned to attract good tenants in a market where demand isn't the problem.

If you'd like an honest, no-obligation view on how your property is placed in the current market, we're happy to talk it through.

This article reflects publicly available housing market data at the time of writing and is intended as general commentary, not financial or legal advice. WG Property is an independent letting agency based in Hull, managing properties across all HU postcodes and the wider East Yorkshire area.