Tenants Under the Hammer

Sit back and watch the hassle-free rental income roll in

Watch as this shelf is turned into a two-bedroom HMO

Every nation has its clichés: in Britain it’s red post boxes, fish and chips, and (supposedly) bad teeth. The long-running BBC series Homes Under the Hammer could probably be added to the list. The show follows buyers as they pick up properties at auction before renovating them. It’s hugely popular, drawing an average audience of 1.3 million viewers. As for how it’s taken me this long to discover a show that has been running on BBC One for twenty consecutive years, I confess I don’t watch much daytime television.

Speaking of outdated clichés, it’s often said that home ownership in Britain is a ‘national obsession’. While probably true at one time - I can remember reading articles in the liberal media twenty years ago about how we should follow the continentals and embrace renting - it’s taken on a subtly different meaning today. Nowadays the British dream is bound up with owning somebody else’s home.

Homes Under the Hammer first aired in 2003, the same year that home ownership in Britain peaked at 70 per cent. Until the mid-1990s the private rental market made up just 9 per cent of UK households. Since then the number of private rentals has more than doubled. As of 2023, around 19 per cent of UK households - about 5.4 million homes - were privately rented. Today there are 2.8 million landlords in Britain, and the average age of a private renter in England has risen to 41. Meanwhile, home ownership has fallen to 65 per cent, and fewer than one-third of Londoners aged 20–39 own a home.

As the economy has changed, so has Homes Under the Hammer. In its early years the programme would often feature people who were simply looking for a place to live. These days buyers are usually more interested in the sales value or ‘rental yield’ of the property, which they view as an ‘investment’. Every episode follows more or less the same formula. A middle aged married couple rip the character out of a two bedroom house and turn it into a white-and-grey HMO (houses in multiple occupation) with 12 bedrooms. A woman named Michelle turns a derelict public toilet into four holiday lets. A property developer named Lenin (yes really) boasts of making a 15 per cent yield on a terraced house in Stoke-on-Trent.

Shortly before becoming party leader, Margaret Thatcher told the Conservative Party Conference in 1975 that ‘We Conservatives believe in creating a property-owning democracy’. After winning the 1979 election, she set about achieving it through the ‘Right to Buy’ scheme, which saw 2.2 million council homes sold to private owners while supply of new social housing was deliberately restricted. By 2016, 40 per cent of the council houses Thatcher and her successors had sold off were being rented out by private landlords.

It was the introduction of buy-to-let mortgages under John Major’s government in 1996 that turbocharged the growth of the modern private rental sector. Landlords now only had to pay the interest on a loan each month rather than the capital. Tax relief for landlords meant they could henceforth pay as little as 10 per cent on their capital gains and no National Insurance.

It’s clear that many of the properties put up for auction on Homes Under the Hammer are probate sales. Watching the show, one always hopes the grandkids aren’t watching as the glib presenters visibly shudder at the departed’s failure to slavishly follow the latest fashions. But not to fear, the pebbledashing, floral print wallpaper and ‘dated’ fittings will all be ‘ripped out’. Cue the inevitable white paint (two shades only: white and brilliant white), dark grey carpet, and B&Q laminate flooring. ‘Job’s a good ’un,’ as one of the unctuous presenters might say.

A few buyers have appeared on the show multiple times. One family has a portfolio of over 200 houses. They like to continuously remortgage in order to buy more. Others prefer to let their purchase sit idle and empty before selling it on at a later date for a profit. The least offensive buyers (besides the vanishingly small number who actually want to live the properties they’ve bought) do the place up before selling it. But most are clearly aiming to do the bare minimum in order to make a financial killing. Family homes are transformed into bog standard holiday lets and HMOs in which it goes without saying (literally) that eight people will be expected to share a kitchen. One room is frequently turned into two or even three with a section of plasterboard (who even wants a living room or a dining area?).

Renovation and refurbishment complete, it’s time to get the pocket book out and tot up the gains. An estate agent arrives to wander around the property looking bemused before giving an updated valuation. One episode I recently watched featured a property developer and landlord from Norfolk named Helen who was ‘looking forward to adding to her growing rental portfolio’. She had recently bought a two-bed flat in the seaside town of Cromer for £107,000. Having given the place a lick of paint and a new bathroom, she is given a resale price of £190,000 and a rental yield of £700 a month by the visiting estate agent. But a moody Helen is having none of it. Like many others who appear on the show, she wants more bang for her buck. ‘I think that’s probably a bit low,’ she snorts. ‘I’ve talked to someone who will let it for me for £875.’ This, the presenters gleefully inform viewers, will bring in a ‘healthy yield of over 7 per cent’.

If people on the show appear to be raking it in, that’s partly because buyers (and the makers of the show) rarely disclose the free labour that family and friends have put into the renovations.

More egregious is the fact that the people who will actually live in the properties featured in the show (tenants for the most part) remain invisible throughout. To acknowledge them at all would spoil the illusion that something benign or even admirable is taking place. Instead, the viewer is shown a procession of braying estate agents and petty rentiers whose personalities have seemingly been atrophied by a life lived solely through the prism of getting rich. The typical lingua franca is sales patter and petrol forecourt humour. Clichés and uptalk are ubiquitous.

Occasionally the fourth wall cracks to reveal more than the show’s creators probably intend. New owners will decide against replacing a broken kitchen unit because it would eat into their ‘pocket money’. Mould and damp are quite obviously painted over by a buyer who is in a rush to let it out. In 2022, one of the ‘expert’ estate agents used by the show turned out to be none other than Sheffield’s most notorious landlord. In 2024, Gunes - ‘Gary’ - Ata, a landlord with over 5,000 properties to rent, was fined £97,000 for a ‘serious and deliberate’ failure to manage a block of student flats in Sheffield. The local council have described Ata as a ‘rogue landlord’.

If only Ata were the exception. According to Citizens Advice, 2.7 million households living in privately rented properties – more than half the total – are affected by damp, mould or excessive cold. More than half a million rented homes - both private and social - have black mould issues. Of more than 570,000 complaints about privately rented homes in the past seven years, no action was taken in more than 90 per cent of cases. Fewer than 1 per cent of complaints resulted in a landlord being prosecuted. It isn’t hard to game the system. When interest rates go up, you pass the bill on to your tenants. If they object, you throw them out (by saying you’re selling up) before finding a replacement who will pay because demand is high (in today’s market, there is always somebody desperate enough).

Homes Under the Hammer captures the prevailing zeitgeist of the past 20 years. It assumes with teleological inevitability that property prices will go up along with rents. It tells its audience that work won’t make them rich, but a portfolio of bricks and mortar just might. For whatever reason, our public broadcaster still feels the need to glamourise a form of ‘passive’ income that will see the majority of license payers prostrate and getting screwed.

And yet dark clouds are gathering on the horizon. Certain unpleasant facts are threatening to intrude on the lucrative world of buy to let. Consequently, those who’ve done well out of the recent bonanza are threatening us with an ‘exodus’. The Labour Party is currently pushing its Renters’ Right Bill through parliament. It includes plans to remove section 21 orders, which allow landlords to carry out ‘no fault’ evictions. Just 22 per cent of landlords support the policy; a quarter say they will sell all their properties if it becomes law.

It’s probably best not to take such bleating seriously. The proportion of landlords who reported making a profit actually increased from 84 per cent in the first quarter of 2025 to 87 per cent in the second. Meanwhile, according to the Office for National Statistics, the ratio of rent to income is now ‘unaffordable’ in every London borough.

More than 5 per cent of the adult population in Britain are landlords. As a recent piece in the London Review of Books put it, ‘today most of us, even those of us who rent, are no more than a few degrees of separation away from a rentier, and even closer to an owner-occupier whose financial security is also dependent on landlordism’. Shows like Homes Under the Hammer cater less to the five per cent than to a larger constituency who dream that they too could one day watch the hassle-free rental income roll in. Rent extraction has come to be seen as a human right; the petty rentier as an entrepreneur who is perennially on the cusp of financial freedom.

Despite the obvious drawbacks, it’s a version of democratic capitalism that has proven to be remarkably resilient. Thanks to shows like Homes Under the Hammer, a sizeable chunk of the population see themselves as temporarily embarrassed property tycoons. They may not have much of a stake in the current system, but they can still be relied upon to take the necessary measures in its defence.

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