The end of Section 21 evictions appears to have led to fewer renters looking for a new place compared to a year ago, across five major English cities.
While room listings have also fallen, this means that competition for homes is broadly unchanged under the new system, with similar numbers of rooms advertised per renter looking in London and Bristol, and an increase in Manchester.
Renters in Leeds and Birmingham had tougher competition in August 2026 compared with the same month in 2025, but the situation has improved in the past two months.
While there are reports that rental listings are down, that won’t make an impact on rents if the number of would-be tenants is also down by a similar proportion.
Taking the temperature of the rental market
To understand if it is getting easier or harder to get a tenancy, we often look at how quickly rents are rising and if wages are keeping up. But it takes time for that data to come through – Zoopla’s rent index for July came out in September for example.
But we can get an earlier indication of what conditions are like for the houseshare part of the market by looking at the number of rooms being advertised and the number of people looking for one. The fewer rooms there are for each person looking, the easier it will be for landlords to charge a higher rent.
Spareroom has a webpage which provides a live snapshot of how many rooms are being listed and how many people are looking for a home in cities around the UK. Since January 2026 we have been recording these figures every month for six major cities: London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Bristol and Glasgow. We have also used Wayback Machine to backdate figures for months where these snapshots have been recorded (though there are gaps in this), going back to 2020.
Using the number of rooms available and the number of renters searching, we calculate a simple rooms-to-renters ratio for each city, which indicates how fierce competition is in the market, and therefore whether we should expect rents to rise.
City-level ratios are not easily comparable – in mid-October they ranged from 3.2 in Leeds to 0.9 in Manchester, but this doesn’t necessarily indicate that rents are rising faster in Manchester. Indeed, separate Spareroom data indicates they’ve actually been falling there.
Instead we’re looking for how the ratio has changed over time. In September 2022, when people had been moving back to cities after the pandemic, and rents on new tenancies were soaring, the ratio was a lot lower than it is now, with more renters looking than rooms listed everywhere except Birmingham. Since then the ratio has increased, and rent increases have slowed.
| Rooms-to-Renters ratio | ||||||
| London | Brum | Bristol | Leeds | Manchester | Glasgow | |
| Oct-26 | 1.8 | 2.9 | 1.8 | 3.2 | 0.9 | 1.2 |
| Aug-26 | 1.7 | 2.5 | 1.3 | 2.1 | 0.8 | 0.8 |
| Aug-25 | 1.7 | 2.9 | 1.3 | 2.7 | 0.7 | 0.7 |
| Aug-24 | 1.1 | 1.7 | 0.6 | 1.6 | 0.4 | 0.5 |
| Aug-23 | 0.6 | 1.3 | 0.3 | 1.0 | 0.2 | 0.3 |
| Sep-22 | 0.3 | 1.1 | 0.2 | 0.6 | 0.1 | 0.1 |
Since the Renters Rights Act came into force, the number of rental listings has fallen – Spareroom finds that they have fallen by 4.7% nationally between Q3 2025 and Q3 2026. The numbers we’ve taken from their website find that listings have fallen in most places (but rose in Manchester and Glasgow) but also, crucially, that the number of renters looking has fallen too, by between 10% and 15% in the five English cities.
That is likely to reflect fewer renters needing to move because of the end of Section 21 evictions in May 2026. Because landlords now can’t evict you just to get a new tenant in who will pay more rent, that will have a similar effect on the number of listings too. Renters may also be spending less time looking for somewhere to live, or even buying instead.
While competition for rooms in Birmingham and Leeds appears to have heated up between August 2025 and August 2026, in London and Bristol it is roughly the same, while Manchester has improved. Glasgow has also improved, though the policy landscape is different in Scotland.
Additionally, while August and September typically see the most competition for rooms compared with the rest of the year, Birmingham and Leeds have seen a big improvement since August, largely due to fewer renters looking, though listings are also up in Leeds. While Wayback Machine didn’t capture October figures for last year, renters are in a better position in those cities compared with October 2024, when the ratio was 2.0 in Birmingham and 2.8 in Leeds.
It is still early days for the new tenancy system, and we might yet see long term shifts in how many rooms are listed and renters are looking at any one time, which will affect the ratios we record, particularly with new dynamics for renters to get used to, such as the ban on bidding wars.
Here’s how the numbers break down:
| City | 07/08/2025 | 19/08/2026 | Change | |
| LONDON | Rooms | 21,143 | 18,893 | -11% |
| Flatmates | 12,454 | 10,839 | -13% | |
| Ratio | 1.7 | 1.7 | 0.0 | |
| BIRMINGHAM | Rooms | 2,109 | 1,617 | -23% |
| Flatmates | 721 | 638 | -12% | |
| Ratio | 2.9 | 2.5 | -0.4 | |
| BRISTOL | Rooms | 1,602 | 1,398 | -13% |
| Flatmates | 1,238 | 1,082 | -13% | |
| Ratio | 1.3 | 1.3 | 0.0 | |
| LEEDS | Rooms | 1,705 | 1,095 | -36% |
| Flatmates | 621 | 526 | -15% | |
| Ratio | 2.7 | 2.1 | -0.7 | |
| MANCHESTER | Rooms | 1,353 | 1,396 | 3% |
| Flatmates | 1,924 | 1,726 | -10% | |
| Ratio | 0.7 | 0.8 | +0.1 | |
| GLASGOW | Rooms | 707 | 717 | 1% |
| Flatmates | 963 | 907 | -6% | |
| Ratio | 0.7 | 0.8 | +0.1 | |
| WBM Source | Link | Link | ||
We’ll keep checking this page and will share any interesting trends on the blog. Sign up to get our emails here.
