From Gridlock to Growth: Is the Property Entrepreneur Britain’s Hidden Productivity Engine?
Episode 1: The State as the Bottleneck
The Puzzle That Won’t Go Away
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.
When the State Becomes the Blockage
Britain’s machinery of government is not only inefficient but also obstructive. Instead of enabling growth, it actively suppresses it.
Nowhere is this clearer than in housing. For decades, governments of every political stripe have promised to build 300,000 new homes per year. The result has been depressingly consistent: failure. In 2023, a total of 234,000 net additional dwellings were delivered in England. That gap of 66,000 is not an isolated incident. It has been repeated year after year, compounding into a deficit of millions of homes.
Why is delivery so weak? Because planning is broken. The average major residential application now takes more than 18 months to process, if it is approved at all. Local councils often lack the necessary staff and resources to operate efficiently. Whitehall oscillates between sweeping reforms and panicked U-turns, creating uncertainty and paralysis on the ground. The system is not designed for speed, creativity, or responsiveness. It is designed for caution and delay.
Infrastructure follows the same pattern. HS2 has become a symbol of national embarrassment, a project defined more by what has been cancelled than what has been delivered. But it is hardly alone. Energy grid upgrades lag years behind demand. Local transport schemes often disappear into consultation processes that never seem to end. Even small-scale improvements — a bypass here, a rail extension there — are stifled by the sheer weight of bureaucracy.
The message is clear: the state does not deliver productivity. It throttles it.
The Demographic Squeeze
This would be bad enough in a static country. But Britain is not static. Its population is growing — and fast.
Net migration in 2023 was estimated at around 685,000. Even if that figure moderates in the coming years, inflows are still running at historic highs. Add to this natural population growth, rising life expectancy, and the fact that households are getting smaller (with more people living alone and fewer in extended family units), and the demand for housing remains relentless.
Here is the uncomfortable arithmetic: the UK is adding the equivalent of a city the size of Manchester every two years. Yet, it is not adding housing stock at anywhere near that pace.
So when critics ask why housing is unaffordable, the answer is brutally simple. Supply is miles behind demand. Until that mismatch is resolved, the crisis will deepen.
The Landlord Question
This is where the debate often turns hostile. Politicians rail against landlords. Commentators accuse investors of profiteering. Social media seethes with anti-landlord sentiment.
And let me say something contrarian: the critics are not entirely wrong.
The old model of buy-to-let — hoovering up family homes to rent them back to the very households who need them — does little to solve the crisis. It can even exacerbate it by taking stock out of circulation. When supply is already short, locking up existing homes in landlord portfolios adds pressure to the system.
But here’s what the critics miss. Landlords did not create the shortage. The shortage is a direct result of state failure. If the government had met its own targets over the last two decades, we would not be in this position. If local planning departments had the capacity to approve new homes at scale, supply would be flowing. If infrastructure projects were delivered on time, more land would be viable for development.
Blaming landlords may feel cathartic, but it avoids the structural truth. The problem is not that individuals buy homes to rent. The problem is that the state is unable to build enough homes in the first place.
The Entrepreneurial Alternative
This is where property entrepreneurs must step forward — not as defenders of the old landlord model, but as builders of a new one.
The mission is not extraction. It is creation. The role of a property entrepreneur is not to compete with families for scarce homes, but to expand the stock of available housing. To take what is underused, neglected, or redundant, and repurpose it into something productive.
Look around Britain’s towns and cities. High streets are lined with empty retail shells. Business parks contain obsolete offices. Above-shop upper floors lie forgotten. These are not liabilities. They are opportunities. The state has no mechanism to reimagine them. Entrepreneurs do.
Permitted Development Rights (PDR) provide a powerful tool to cut through planning paralysis. Converting commercial units into residential space, splitting larger properties into multiple units, and creating homes from redundant buildings can all be done more swiftly under PDR. While the state deliberates, entrepreneurs can deliver.
Technology has shifted the game, too. Where government still works with crude national averages, entrepreneurs can deploy AI to analyse demand at the micro level. Street by street, postcode by postcode, entrepreneurs can identify where housing need is highest, where conversions make sense, and where cashflow can be unlocked.
And entrepreneurship is not just about bricks and mortar. It is about structures. Lease re-gearing can release value trapped in outdated contracts. Creative finance — vendor deferments, joint ventures, assisted sales — can unlock deals that would otherwise be stuck. The state sees obstacles. Entrepreneurs see levers.
Landlords Extract, Entrepreneurs Add
This is the crucial distinction.
Landlords extract from the existing supply.
Entrepreneurs add to it.
Landlords buy homes that already exist. Entrepreneurs create homes that otherwise would not exist. One is zero-sum. The other is net positive.
And when you scale that entrepreneurial activity across the country, its macro impact becomes clear. A six-bed HMO from a tired office in Birmingham. Ten studios carved out of a redundant retail unit in Manchester. A cluster of apartments above a shop in Chester. Small projects in isolation, but multiplied across thousands of entrepreneurs, they represent a silent surge of supply.
In effect, property entrepreneurs become the “shadow planners” of Britain — delivering homes the state cannot.
The Unicorn Model
This is what I call the Unicorn Model: a framework for turning underutilised assets into high-yield, socially useful housing. It is not speculation. It is strategy. It looks for mispriced assets, hidden value, and overlooked opportunities. And it engineers supply into existence where the state has left only gaps.
Unicorn deals are not just about profit, though they are profitable. They are about productivity. Every deal contributes to solving the structural shortage. Every project chips away at the national gridlock. Every entrepreneur who applies this model is not just building wealth; they are building Britain’s future.
From Gridlock to Growth
Britain’s productivity problem begins with the state. That much is clear. But it will not be solved there. The arithmetic of migration, demographics, and housing shortfalls is unforgiving. Unless new stock is created, the crisis will worsen.
Traditional landlordism cannot provide that stock. Indeed, it risks exacerbating scarcity. But property entrepreneurs can. By repurposing redundant assets, harnessing PDR, leveraging AI, and structuring deals creatively, they can create the homes Britain desperately needs.
In doing so, they transform themselves from investors into nation-builders. From participants in the market to productivity agents of the economy. From landlords to entrepreneurs.
And that, I would argue, is the only way Britain can move from gridlock to growth.
Looking Ahead
This essay is the first in a short series exploring how property entrepreneurs can become Britain’s hidden productivity engine. Today, we diagnosed the problem: the state is the bottleneck. Next week, we’ll explore the solution: how AI provides entrepreneurs with a precision tool to outpace the state, mapping both macro trends and micro-markets with a clarity that Whitehall could never dream of.
If you want a deeper dive into how to apply these strategies in practice, I unpack the full Unicorn Model in my book Property Unicorns — which you can grab for just the cost of postage. It’s a playbook for moving beyond landlordism and becoming part of the entrepreneurial solution.