The National Residential Landlords Association has put a number on something many in the lettings trade have suspected for years: purpose-built rental housing is doing far more of the heavy lifting in regeneration than its overall size suggests. New figures from NRLA Living, the organisation's arm for institutional and large-scale landlords, show that Build to Rent (BTR) schemes have delivered an average of 61% of new homes built across eight of the UK's leading regeneration areas over the past decade, despite accounting for under 2% of the national housing stock.
The scale of that concentration in a handful of places is striking. In Stratford in London and Redcliff in Bristol, BTR accounted for 87% of all homes built over the last ten years. In Milton Keynes Central the proportion reached 73%, and in Blackhorse Lane in Waltham Forest it was 66%. Those are not marginal contributions. They are, in the areas studied, close to the entire story of new housing delivery.
NRLA Living frames this as evidence that BTR neighbourhoods act as 'anchor tenants' to regeneration schemes by placing new residents on the ground at an early stage. The research also links a stronger BTR presence to faster population growth, and specifically to younger renters: locations with a higher Build to Rent presence have witnessed higher levels of population growth, with BTR particularly successful at attracting on average five times the number of 20-39 year olds into new regeneration areas compared with other local authority areas.
A message aimed squarely at Westminster
The timing and tone of the release make clear this is not a celebration of BTR at the expense of traditional landlords. NRLA chief executive Ben Beadle used the findings to make a pointed argument to government. Beadle said: "We believe that Build to Rent makes, and can continue to make, a valuable contribution to the UK's supply of housing, alongside traditional buy to let (BTL)." He went further, warning that "housing delivery can only happen at scale if the Government takes steps to ensure investment is encouraged rather than stifled," adding, "Crucially we believe that a thriving BTR market must complement a growing BTL sector if the UK is ever going to meet its ambitious housing objectives." The closing line was the starkest: without a bold vision which attaches an equal level of importance to both sectors, the Government will simply fail to solve the UK's housing crisis.
Iain Murray of Bidwells, the property adviser working alongside NRLA Living, added a useful qualifier to the headline percentages: BTR's impact on a neighbourhood "is usually judged on the number of homes it delivers, but this research shows its impact runs wider than that." That distinction matters for anyone weighing up the sector's real contribution rather than just counting units.
What this looks like from Kent
None of this is abstract for landlords operating in Kent, where the tension between institutional capital and the traditional private landlord has been quietly playing out for a while. East Kent's lettings market has genuinely gathered pace this year, with professional landlords continuing to view East Kent as a reliable, attractive marketplace through 2025 and into 2026. Supply has responded accordingly: supply increased by 21% compared with 2024, contributing to an increase of 4.7% in lets agreed year-on-year.
What's notable is where some of that new supply is coming from. New build flats feature prominently in the rental landscape, particularly in Whitstable, Cliftonville and Ramsgate, where developers originally looking to secure sales have decided to focus on longer-term rental income instead. That is not institutional BTR in the Stratford or Milton Keynes sense, but it is a recognisably similar instinct: developers concluding that renting, not selling, is the more reliable route to return in the current climate. The demographic backing that shift is changing too, with the landlord population in Kent gradually shifting toward younger investors, many opting to buy outside the capital due to lower house prices and higher yields.
Medway tells a similar story of a market under sustained pressure rather than in retreat. There are currently 1,250 homes listed as available for rent in the Medway area, with an average asking rent of £1,312 per month, slightly above the 12-month average. New listings are outpacing what has already been achieved, evidence that the market is continuing to move upward, with new listings coming to market at an average of £1,312 per month versus a 12-month achieved average of £1,211. For landlords with stock in Medway, that gap is a useful reminder to reprice rather than rely on last year's comparables.
Yields tell a more mixed story
Kent's underlying returns, however, sit slightly below the national picture, which is exactly why the BTR-versus-BTL debate matters here. The county has an average buy-to-let rental yield of 3.4% across 13 councils and 73 postcode districts, below the England average of 3.6%. That average masks considerable variation. The highest-yielding councils in Kent are Dartford (4.2%), Swale (3.8%), and Medway UA (3.7%), and at postcode level the top districts are ME6, ME11 and CT17, each at 4.7%. Dartford's appeal is reinforced by its own momentum, with the borough running a programme of regeneration aimed at making Dartford a better place to live, and Ebbsfleet Garden City, described as a major new build town between Dartford and Gravesend, continuing to add scale nearby. These are precisely the kinds of locations where the NRLA's regeneration argument, that concentrated new housing delivery reshapes an area's demographics and demand, will be tested locally in the coming years.
Connectivity remains the other constant. HS1 services from Ashford, Ebbsfleet and Canterbury continue to support commuter-led renting, particularly among professional tenants priced out of London ownership. For smaller landlords in those towns, that steady commuter demand has always been the buffer against the volatility seen in more speculative coastal or seasonal markets.
Reform adds a further complication
All of this is unfolding as Kent's housing sector braces for the practical fallout of the Renters' Rights Act. From 1 May 2026, Phase 1 of the Act introduced a wide range of new rules changing how private tenancies work, reforms described as among the biggest updates to renting law in a generation, expected to create both challenges and new opportunities for housing across Kent. Kent Housing Group, bringing together housing professionals from local councils and partner organisations, has been working to keep guidance consistent as the changes bed in. For a traditional landlord already absorbing new compliance obligations, the prospect of institutional capital scaling up locally can feel like an additional threat rather than a complement.
The NRLA's argument, backed by its national figures, is that this framing gets it backwards. BTR schemes bring early residents and footfall to regeneration areas that individual landlords could never generate alone, while the flexibility, local knowledge and dispersed stock of traditional buy to let fills the gaps that institutional capital, by its nature, will always leave behind. Kent, with its patchwork of coastal towns turning flats into lets, commuter corridors feeding off HS1, and regeneration zones like Dartford and Ebbsfleet still taking shape, looks like a county where that balance will be worked out in practice rather than in policy papers. Whether government listens to the NRLA's call for equal treatment of both sectors will shape how much of that new supply actually gets built.