Rob Stewart’s route into property was not polished, easy or guru-led. It was built through mistakes, market cycles, hard lessons and a shift from chasing yield to creating real value through mixed-use buildings, regeneration and housing supply.

Recent coverage in The Negotiator highlighted accusations that a Labour donor’s property company has issued large numbers of eviction notices ahead of the proposed abolition of Section 21.

The story has triggered predictable reactions.

Criticism of landlords.
Political concern.
Debate around whether such actions align with the “spirit” of the legislation.

On the surface, it appears to be another flashpoint in the ongoing tension between tenant protection and landlord behaviour.

But step back, and the situation looks very different.

Because what is being reported is not an isolated incident.
It is a predictable response to a policy signal

Depending on the political lens applied, the crisis is attributed to landlords, developers, investors, planning authorities, government policy, or some combination of them all. The discussion often becomes ideological very quickly.

Yet the longer one spends working inside the housing system — acquiring sites, converting redundant buildings, regenerating property and delivering homes — the clearer a simpler explanation becomes.

Britain’s housing challenge is largely the consequence of a system that has not produced enough homes for a very long time.

When housing supply consistently falls short of demand, the outcomes are predictable. Rents rise, ownership becomes harder to access, and younger generations find it increasingly difficult to establish themselves. These pressures then feed political frustration, which in turn produces policy interventions that sometimes make the supply problem even harder to solve.

Why the new EPC and Decent Homes trajectory matters far more than people realise

If you take the government’s updated Decent Homes Standard and revised MEES direction at face value, and then run it forward using reasonable assumptions, you don’t get a gentle adjustment to the private rented sector.

You get a violent reshuffling.

Not an overnight collapse.
Not an apocalypse.

But a multi-year sorting mechanism that strands some stock, squeezes certain landlords out, reprices whole sub-markets, and quietly advantages those who create new, rental-grade dwellings over those trying to preserve legacy stock.

What follows is a sector-level model: Who gets squeezed, what becomes non-viable, how behaviour shifts, and why tenants ultimately sit downstream of all of it.

The housing debate in Britain is stuck.

Every cycle looks the same.
Landlords versus tenants.
Private sector versus public sector.
Market failure versus state failure.

The arguments change tone, but not structure. And because the structure is wrong, the outcomes never change.

What’s missing from the conversation isn’t a better villain or a stronger policy position.
What’s missing is an entire layer of the housing system.

Britain doesn’t just have a housing crisis.
It has an infrastructure gap.

And until that gap is acknowledged and filled, no amount of political pressure, regulation, or ideological debate will fix the underlying problem.

How I Would Invest in Property in 2026 and Beyond

(And why most people won’t)

Every property cycle creates its own myths.

In the last one, the myth was simple:
Buy a house. Add leverage. Wait.

That worked .. not because it was smart, but because the system rewarded passivity.

That era is over.

Not temporarily.
Structurally.

So when people ask me “Is property still worth investing in?” my answer is always the same:

Yes, but only if you play a different game.

If I were starting today, or rebuilding a portfolio for 2026 and beyond, I would follow five rules. Miss one, and the model eventually breaks.

A critical analysis of Nick Bano’s argument on housing, supply, and affordability

In recent debates on housing, a familiar argument has resurfaced with renewed confidence: that Britain does not suffer from a housing shortage, but from “landlordism”. The claim is that abolishing or collapsing the private rented sector would restore affordability, security, and social justice… without the need for large-scale housebuilding.

This view is most clearly articulated by Nick Bano, a barrister specialising in renters’ rights and the author of Against Landlords. His Guardian essay has become a reference point for many online commentators, particularly those using terms such as “rentier economy” or “landlordism” as explanatory frameworks for the housing crisis.

The problem is not that this argument raises moral concerns… it does.
The problem is that it mistakes a complex systems failure for a simple class conflict, and in doing so replaces housing economics with ideology.

This article examines why.

Congratulations. You fell for it.

If the reaction to my Social Media Posts demonstrated anything, it is that the system remains remarkably effective at doing exactly what it was designed to do. With impressive efficiency, it split the country into familiar, warring camps: landlords versus tenants, rich versus poor, parasites versus victims. The lines were drawn, the moral positions assumed, and the arguments duly rehearsed.

Few ideas travel faster online than the claim that landlords are parasites. It is a neat moral judgement, compact enough to fit on a placard or into a tweet, and expansive enough to absorb a wide range of social frustrations. Rising rents, insecure tenancies, visible inequality, and decades of housing failure all collapse into a single villain.

The problem is not that this critique exists. The problem is that it often stops at accusation.

I want to take the argument seriously, including its strongest counterclaims, because housing is too important to be reduced to slogans. If landlords truly are parasitic, then we should be able to explain not only why they are morally wrong, but how their removal would materially improve housing outcomes.

The Budget has barely cooled, and already the usual storms of commentary are beginning to form, headlines without context, soundbites without analysis, outrage without understanding. Yet buried beneath the noise is something far more profound than a few changes to tax rates or reliefs.

Budget 2025 is not just another fiscal event. It is a declaration of intent. It signals a fundamental repositioning of how the UK treats work, capital, and, most importantly, the people who take risks to build businesses, homes, and prosperity. The changes aren’t simply financial. They’re philosophical. And if you’re a property entrepreneur, this Budget marks a turning point that has been quietly building for years.

As a 4th generation RAF pilot I’ve spent the majority of my life living in a military environment. Great grandad flew in the Great War, both Grandads we’re WW2 aircrew and Dad was a Cold War era fighter pilot. Despite trying my hardest not to (a story for another time), flying was in the DNA and the inevitable happened in Oct 2001 when I rocked up, wide eyed and nervous as hell, at the doors of the RAF College to start officer training.

After 12 intense years with extreme highs and lows, (and a few stories to tell) it was time for another challenge, and I left the military to go it alone in business. At first I didn’t realise it, but there are huge lessons learned in the military that are transferable to business.

Britain’s most effective growth strategy isn’t written in a manifesto. It’s being built, brick by brick, by people the state barely recognises. While Westminster debates housing targets, entrepreneurs across the country are quietly transforming disused offices, obsolete shops, and forgotten upper floors into vibrant new homes and workspaces. They are converting redundancy into productivity, not through subsidies or slogans, but through initiative. They are Britain’s hidden productivity engine — an informal network of creators, builders, and problem-solvers who are doing what government cannot: delivering growth through action. And yet, in the national conversation about “growth,” they are invisible. The media obsesses over tech unicorns in San Francisco. Politicians trade promises about “levelling up.” Bureaucrats draft white papers no one reads. Meanwhile, thousands of small developers….the real builders of renewal, are dismissed as “landlords” or “speculators.” That mischaracterisation isn’t just inaccurate. It’s corrosive. Because it blinds us to the one class of citizens actually doing what Britain desperately needs, turning stagnation into regeneration.

This essay is for them. 

It’s a manifesto for a new movement: one grounded in entrepreneurship, intelligence, and civic purpose. The people who, while the state consults, build.

The problem isn’t simply that we lack homes, it’s that we keep building the wrong ones.
We are still designing for a world that no longer exists: a world of 9-to-5 commuters, nuclear families, and predictable careers. But the social contract that underpinned that world has collapsed. The way people live, work, and create has changed beyond recognition, yet the built environment remains trapped in the last century.

What Britain faces is not just a housing shortage, but a fit-for-purpose shortage.
We have millions of dwellings, but too few places to actually live.The Mismatch Economy
The post-pandemic economy has redrawn the boundaries between work, home, and identity.
One in three workers now operates partly from home. Freelancers, creators, and small business owners form the fastest-growing segment of the UK labour market. Meanwhile, household sizes are shrinking, single-person living is at record highs, and longevity is reshaping family patterns.
Yet housing policy still assumes a “standard household” that barely exists anymore. The state continues to measure success in units delivered, not utility created.
We keep adding bedrooms when what people increasingly need are studios, micro-offices, and hybrid social spaces. We build commuter suburbs even as commuting dies. We push people toward ownership when their lives demand flexibility.
This is the structural mismatch at the heart of Britain’s property malaise: a society that has changed faster than its spaces.

Britain’s housing crisis is not just a shortage of homes, it’s a shortage of intelligence.
We have more data than at any point in history, yet we deploy it with the speed of a rotary phone.
The gap between what is possible and what is permitted has never been wider.

Planning departments process applications on software older than their staff. Councils debate five-year housing targets while technology evolves in five-week cycles. The state moves linearly; intelligence compounds exponentially.
That asymmetry — between bureaucratic inertia and exponential capacity — is where the new generation of property entrepreneurs will make their fortunes.
Because while Westminster debates, algorithms calculate.
While departments consult, entrepreneurs execute.

And in that quiet gap between permission and progress, the future is already being built.

For more than a decade, Britain has been haunted by a question that economists and policymakers return to again and again: why can’t the UK raise its productivity?

Productivity growth — the amount of output produced per worker, per hour — is the foundation of prosperity. It is what allows wages to rise, public services to be funded sustainably, and living standards to improve over time. Yet in Britain, productivity has been stagnant since the global financial crisis of 2008. According to the Office for National Statistics, output per hour is just 2% higher today than it was in 2007. Had the pre-crisis trend continued, it would be nearly 20% higher.

That missing 18% is not just an academic number. This is why real wages have remained virtually unchanged in fifteen years. This is why public services are stretched to breaking point. This is why the economy feels like it is permanently running uphill.

The usual diagnoses are rolled out on repeat: poor management practices, underinvestment in research, weak skills, and lacklustre business confidence. All of these explanations have some truth. But they circle around the real issue without ever touching it. Britain’s productivity problem is not fundamentally about its workers or its firms. It is about its state.

Most people who approach property development for the first time are taught to focus on the headline numbers. The land cost, the build cost, the end value. Nice and neat, simple on paper. But the reality of development isn’t simple — and if you go into a project looking only at the headline numbers, you will almost certainly lose money.

I see this time and again: an over-simplified model of development that works well for selling training courses, but not for building a sustainable business. You’ve probably heard the guru maths. “Surely you can build a house for £250,000.” And in isolation, yes, of course you can. That’s not the point. The real question is: what’s the true all-in cost of getting from start to finish, and does the margin stack?

That’s what matters.

So let’s pull back the curtain and talk through what the numbers actually look like on a real project. I’ll use my current Chester commercial conversion as an example.

If I had to rebuild my property business from scratch tomorrow, the very first big decision I’d face is deceptively simple—but it’s where 80% of investors go wrong.

Are you strategy-led or area-led?

Most people don’t even realise they’ve made this choice, but it shapes everything that follows in their investing journey. Get it wrong, and you’ll waste months chasing deals that will never deliver. Get it right, and your path forward becomes clear.

If I lost it all and had to start again in property, the very first thing I’d do is simple: I’d get crystal clear on my strategy. Not with guesswork, not with outdated rules of thumb, but with AI doing the heavy lifting.

I’ve been investing for years, and one of the biggest mistakes I see new and even seasoned investors make is diving into tactics without understanding the bigger picture. They ask: “Should I do buy-to-lets, BRRR, or flips?” But that’s the wrong starting point. The right question is: “Given my capital, my goals, my risk appetite, and my time, what strategy actually makes sense right now?”

That’s where AI changes the game.

Every so often, you’ll see a headline-grabbing claim on social media:

“Three nights in this Airbnb paid off my mortgage!”

It’s catchy. It’s shareable. And unfortunately, it’s almost always wrong.

Recently, I came across a claim from a host saying their Airbnb was generating £120,000 per year — enough that just a few nights’ bookings could “cover” their mortgage. Sounds amazing. But as an investor who runs the numbers for a living, I couldn’t resist breaking it down.

Alright, let’s be blunt: the traditional buy-to-let model is on life support.

For decades, landlords could ride on cheap debt, tax advantages, and light-touch regulation. That era is over.