The Landlord Business Case:
The Landlord Business Case:
Private landlords spent £6.41bn on repairs and maintenance in a single year. That's 1.92 million landlords, about 11p of every £1 of rental income declared to HMRC in 2024-25, and one of the two most commonly claimed expenses of any kind (HMRC, 2026). Hello Neighbour's analysis puts the average at £3,339 per landlord.
One caveat: HMRC's data only covers unincorporated landlords, so it reflects the smaller end of the sector rather than institutional operators. It's still the clearest official picture of what it costs to keep a rented home in order.
You won't see that number in many headlines. The debate about the private rented sector is mostly about what landlords take. It rarely asks what they carry: the boiler, the roof, the void, the refurb, and everything inside the front door.
We've furnished more than 250,000 properties since 2003, so we'll declare our interest. But the data tells a more useful story than either side of that debate allows, and it makes a clear business case for how landlords, operators and developers should think about the inside of the home.
What the data actually says
The English Housing Survey 2024-25 (housing quality and private rented sector reports) gives three findings that matter to anyone furnishing rental homes:
- The service is good. 68% of private renters are satisfied with repairs and maintenance, ahead of housing association tenants (58%), council tenants (55%) and leaseholders (49%).
- The buildings are tired. 22% of private rented homes fail the Decent Homes Standard, against 14% of owner-occupied homes, 12% of council homes and 9% of housing association homes. 11% have surveyor-recorded damp.
- Handoffs hurt. Satisfaction is 74% when the landlord handles repairs directly, but 59% when it goes through an agent or property manager.
Possession claims are a small share of tenancies, at around 1.2% a year on Hello Neighbour's estimate. On Ministry of Justice figures for April to June 2026 (about 16,200 private landlord and accelerated claims), the annualised rate is nearer 1.4%, and claims were rising. A claim isn't an eviction, and the Ministry says it's too early to link the rise to the Renters' Rights Act. Meanwhile 63% of tenancies that ended did so because the tenant wanted to move.
Hold on to those three points. They're the whole business case.
The Renters' Rights Act puts turnover risk on the operator
The Renters' Rights Act took effect on 1 May 2026. Fixed terms have gone. Private tenancies are now assured periodic tenancies that roll on until the tenant chooses to leave or the landlord proves a legal ground for possession, and Section 21 no-fault evictions have been abolished.
Even before the Act, most moves were chosen, not forced: 63% of private renters whose tenancy ended wanted to move, against 14% who were asked to leave.
That changes the economics of the home. Turnover is no longer something you can contract away, so retention has to be earned through the quality of the place itself. Every move-out becomes a decision point: refresh, replace or void.
Our view is that most rental units don't need a full re-fit. They need the tired 30% replaced and restyled, with the old furniture removed and recycled in the same visit. That's what our RE-FRESH service does: one scoping visit, one crew, one job number.
Pets are the clearest example of how renter expectations are shifting. 8% of private renters, around 363,000 households, were told in the past year that they couldn't rent a property because of a pet. The Act now gives tenants the right to request one, and landlords can refuse only on reasonable grounds. That's why we built Pet First Furnishings: homes designed for how people actually live, pets included.
The compliance bill is landing on the same budget
Costs are already outrunning rent. HMRC's figures show unincorporated landlords' expenses rising 56% between 2020-21 and 2024-25, while rental income rose 26%. On our arithmetic from HMRC's totals, costs now absorb 58.9p of every £1 of rent, up from 47.8p.
The next decade adds two more obligations, competing for the same capital:
- EPC C for every privately rented home in England and Wales by 1 October 2030, with a £10,000 cost cap and 10-year exemptions. The government is aiming for regulations in force during 2027 (government response).
- A new Decent Homes Standard for both rented sectors from 2035, announced on 28 January 2026. Under today's standard 22% of private rented homes fail, and the median cost of putting that right is five months' rent.
When budgets tighten, furnishing is easy to defer, and residents live with the result every day. A sofa with a broken frame won't fail an inspection, but it tells the person using it how much you care.
We don't fix a failed parapet or a damp wall, and nobody should pretend otherwise. What operators can control is what's inside the home, and whether that cost is predictable while everything else isn't.
The case for a lifecycle partner, not a one-off order
The data points to a different way of buying furniture: as a costed lifecycle, not a series of one-off orders. That's what we mean by Furniture as a Service. It makes four arguments:
- Predictable cost. One costed lifecycle replaces ad hoc replacement spend, right when compliance capex is peaking.
- One accountable partner. We cover design, sourcing, installation, maintenance, replacement and recycling, with in-house installation teams and more than £2m of stock held for immediate dispatch. No handoff for things to fall through.
- Built for turnover. RE-FRESH resets a unit in a single visit. NESTBLOK, our modular student accommodation system developed with A Designer at Heart, won an interior design award at the Property Week Student Accommodation Awards. Our co-living range and Pet First Furnishings are designed for real footfall and real life.
- ESG you can evidence. LOFT Renewal diverts 99.43% of furniture from landfill, and we hold ISO 14001:2015. Through our Reuse Network partnership, usable furniture reached 106 households in FY24-25. End Furniture Poverty is part of how we do ESG, not a separate CSR project.
We've done this at scale, including 150 apartments for Grainger at The Kimmeridge in Oxford, 222 at Millwright's Place in Bristol, and over 300 at Cortland Broad Street in ten weeks. We also supply Clay Life on a replenishment basis, and the National Landlord Investment Show named us Best Supplier to the Private Rented Sector.
None of this is about spending more. It's about spending once, spending knowingly, and knowing what happens to every piece at the end.
Measure cost per occupied month, not price per piece
The unit price on a quote tells you very little. The number that matters is total furniture cost over the asset's life, divided by occupied months. Ask every supplier, including us, to show it. Then check four things:
- Purchase and installation: what's the full landed cost, installed and ready to let?
- Repair and replacement: what fails first, and who fixes it?
- Turnover refresh: how fast and how cheaply can a unit be reset between tenants?
- End-of-life disposal: what happens to each piece, and what does it cost?
To see why this beats comparing unit prices, take a package priced from £2,400 ex VAT and delivery (LOFT's Silver package) against a hypothetical cheaper set at £1,800. The service lives and 90% occupancy rate are our illustrative assumptions, so swap in your own.
- £2,400 package: 5-year life, 54 occupied months, £44 per occupied month.
- Cheaper set: 2.5-year life, 27 occupied months, £67 per occupied month.
The cheaper set is 25% less on the quote and about 50% more for every month someone lives with it. (That excludes delivery, VAT, repairs and disposal.) If a supplier can't give you this figure, you're carrying the risk they haven't priced.
Straight talking about what comes next
Most landlords look after their tenants well. The data says so. But the homes are older than they should be, the compliance bill is real, and the rules are changing under everyone's feet.
The operators who come through it best will treat the inside of the home as a managed asset with a known cost and a known end, not a recurring surprise. That's the business we've spent more than twenty years building.
Want to see what your own cost per occupied month looks like? Get in touch with the LOFT team.
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