Does Build-to-Rent (BtR) deliver for renters, or does it mainly provide more expensive homes in a small number of high-demand areas? I discussed this question at the recent European Network for Housing Research (ENHR) conference in Oslo (30 June – 3 July 2026), where I presented early findings from our CaCHE project, funded by the Nationwide Foundation. The presentation looks at BtR Greater Manchester, which is the largest BtR market outside the capital.
Private renting in the UK has traditionally been dominated by small-scale landlords, often owning only one or a small number of rental properties.
Recently, large companies and investment funds have become an increasingly important source of investment in new rental housing, particularly homes designed and built specifically for rent.
Known as Built-to-Rent (BtR), these developments are built specifically for renting and are usually in single ownership and professionally managed by one company.
Supporters argue that BtR can add new rental homes and address some of the quality and management problems associated with the wider private rented sector (Brill and Durrant, 2021).
Critics question whether it is affordable to a broad range of renters, as research suggests that most BtR developments occupy the middle-to-higher end of the rental market and are often targeted at higher-end users (Carvalho et al., 2023).
There is still limited independent research on how BtR affects residents and the local rental market. Our project was designed as a discovery and evidence-gathering study to help fill this important gap.
The project examines these issues using several sources.
Molior records help us identify where BtR developments are located. Reviews from HomeViews provide information about residents’ experiences, while Zoopla listings allow us to examine changes in rents in nearby areas.
Together, these sources allow us to begin to answer three questions: where BtR is being delivered, how do residents experience living in BtR, and what, if anything, happens to nearby rents after schemes open?
Where Build-to-Rent lands
Our data show that Build-to-Rent is now a significant part of Greater Manchester’s rental market, though it is heavily concentrated in a few areas (see map below, Figure 1).
We identified 86 schemes across seven local authorities, amounting to more than 32,000 total units either completed or planned, of which over 20,000 are already occupied or available to rent.
In little more than a decade, BtR has grown from a niche into a material part of how the city-region rents.
But that growth is uneven.
Most of it is in Manchester and Salford, which each have more than 7,000 BtR homes, largely clustered around Manchester city centre and Salford Quays, two major areas of property-led regeneration and high-density residential development over the past decade (Goulding et al., 2023).
BtR has only recently begun to spread further out, appearing in Stockport, Bury and Rochdale since 2020, and on a much smaller scale.
Ownership is concentrated too.
The five largest operators account for more than 34% of completed BtR homes, which may reflect the long-term, capital-intensive nature of the model.
And with affordable housing barely being delivered, our data records only a handful of affordable homes in 2024.
In short, BtR is adding new rental homes to Greater Manchester, but most are let at market rates and built in areas where rents are already high.
What residents say
If supply data tell us where BtR is developing, resident reviews tell us how it feels to live in them.
Drawing on HomeViews ratings across six dimensions, a consistent pattern emerges.
Location receives the highest average rating, while management receives the lowest. Facilities and value for money also score below location.
In other words, residents appear to value the location of their scheme more highly than its management, facilities or value-for-money.
That gap widens with distance from the core, management scores in particular fall away in the outer boroughs, and Salford scores lower on resident experience despite its strong location.
It seems that a great location does not, on its own, guarantee a well-run building.
The reviews cannot tell us whether residents consciously accept weaker management in return for a preferred location, or whether the pattern reflects differences between operators, buildings and local rental markets.
The next stage of the project will explore these issues through a tenant survey, allowing us to examine residents’ experiences in more detail.
What it does to local rents
The most interesting finding concerns affordability. BtR clusters in the most expensive parts of the city, so a natural assumption is that it pushes local rents up further.
To test this, we used a statistical approach that compares advertised rents in the postcodes closest to a newly opened scheme, within roughly 500 metres, against otherwise-similar areas that have BtR approved but not yet built, and accounting for the fact that schemes open at different times.
The results show that rents do not respond in the year a scheme launches, and the pre-trends are flat, which suggests the comparison is sound.
But one year after launch, nearby private rents are around 4% lower than in comparable control areas, and that effect grows as the building fills and the supply is absorbed, reaching roughly 12% lower after five years, or about £100 a month at Manchester’s average rent.
This does not mean rents fell.
It means nearby rents ended up approximately 12% lower than they would otherwise have been, relative to the comparison areas.
Rather than inflating surrounding rents, concentrated BtR supply appears to moderate local rent growth.
These estimates are still preliminary, partly because BtR is new and few schemes have yet been operating for a full five years.
What the ENHR audience raised
Presenting work in progress generated a great deal of interest and some genuinely useful feedback. Three themes recurred.
The first was the impact on lower-income households.
A slower growth of market rents is not the same as improving access for those already priced out, especially when BtR itself offers so little affordable provision.
It is a fair and important challenge, and it pushes us to distinguish carefully between a general effect on nearby asking rents and the distributional question of who actually benefits.
One related question is whether BtR and nearby private rented homes occupy the same part of the market.
New BtR homes may compete most directly with newer or higher-quality private rented properties, while older homes may serve a different group of renters.
Our current estimates compare rent trends across developments rather than matching BtR home with an identical conventional rental property.
Further analysis will compare rents with local incomes and benefit levels, helping us assess who can afford these homes and who benefits from any slowing of rent.
The second was about the scale of delivery needed to impact the local market at all.
Our Manchester result appears because delivery there has been both large and spatially concentrated.
Whether a smaller or more dispersed pipeline would have any measurable effect is a policy-relevant question.
The third came from the investment side.
It is tempting to read a slowing down in local rental growth as a threat to the BtR returns, but that does not necessarily follow: BtR rents, occupancy, operating costs and investment returns need not move with conventional PRS rents next door.
We do not yet have sufficiently detailed case-study evidence on these aspects. The better way to frame it is as an open question.
If substantial BtR delivery moderates rent growth in surrounding markets, through attracting tenants who might otherwise have rented newer or higher-quality conventional properties, how, if at all, does that feed back into BtR rents, occupancy, returns and investors’ appetite for further development?
It is a question that connects our findings on tenants to the financial logic behind the sector and motivates further analysis to establish whether BtR is competing within the same rental submarket.
So, what does BtR deliver and for whom?
On this early evidence, the answer is: partly, and unevenly across local markets.
Institutional BtR delivers real supply and a measurable easing of local rents; it delivers in Manchester in central locations but in some cases offers patchy management and value-for-money.
It looks, in short, like a spatially concentrated premium, but one with real benefit to those rents next door – for the tenants, if not the landlords in terms of rental growth.
These are preliminary findings, and the questions from Oslo have already helped us see where the analysis needs to go: the impacts for lower-income renters, the thresholds of delivery at which effects appear, and how all of this feeds back into investor behaviour and PRS policy across the UK.
We are grateful to the ENHR organisers and to everyone who came along with questions and ideas, and we will report more as the project develops.
References
Brill, F. and Durrant, D. (2021) ‘The emergence of a Build to Rent model: The role of narratives and discourses’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 53(5), pp. 1140–1157. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X20969417
Carvalho, R., Liu, T., Zhang, F., Yu, R. and Oh, E. (2023) ‘Key themes of Build-to-Rent: Developing a conceptual framework for achieving successful developments through a systematic literature review’, Buildings, 13(8), 1926. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings13081926
Goulding, R., Leaver, A. and Silver, J. (2023) ‘From homes to assets: Transcalar territorial networks and the financialization of build to rent in Greater Manchester’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 55(4), pp. 828–849. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X221138104
