The opposite in fact happens -wealthier tenants move into the plush newbuild so are no longer competing for the scruffy old property, which puts a downward pressure on rents.
Replies
None of which stops landlords outbidding owner-occupiers.
aug 25, 2025, 8:23 am • 0 0 • view
The newbuild flats themselves may be expensive (so average rents may have gone up on an area) but the rents on the older housing may even fall a little (or not go up as fast as they otherwise would have).
aug 25, 2025, 7:27 am • 8 1 • view
On a related topic, is there any merit in using a criteria for "affordability" based on median earnings and £/m2? Why are house prices and rent increases referenced to market? isn't this hiding the real degrade in housing stock, both as quality and size?
aug 25, 2025, 10:17 am • 0 0 • view
Tbh I think it's more likely that they don't interact at all. Either they're close enough in quality that both anchoring and competition effects are possible, or they're just serving totally different markets
aug 25, 2025, 7:34 am • 1 0 • view
The people moving into the nice newbuild flats must have come from somewhere. Many of them would surely have previously rented older, cheaper housing.
aug 25, 2025, 7:37 am • 0 0 • view
A sudden upgrade like that is relatively rare, the number who moved into a luxury development from a hyperlocal midmarket terrace must be vanishingly small, and in a supply constrained market will have zero effect on rents. In fact increased throughflow tends to correlate with rent increases
aug 25, 2025, 7:52 am • 0 0 • view
Where do you imagine the new tenants came from? It wasn't thin air.
aug 25, 2025, 10:33 am • 0 0 • view
Literally anywhere in the UK or abroad, people are highly geographically mobile at high income levels, and there will be some new household formation. The proportion that come from a dusty terrace in the same neighbourhood is gonna be pretty marginal unless they won the lottery
aug 25, 2025, 10:37 am • 1 0 • view
People who rent tend to have jobs locally - that's a key reason that they're renting. And the market isn't divided into two distinct halves. There are always mid market rentals in between. And in London plenty of mid-high earners renting scruffy old houses.
aug 25, 2025, 10:41 am • 0 0 • view
People who rent are by definition more mobile than people who buy. Any housing market is divided into largely non-interacting tiers, people are much more likely to change neighbourhood than change tier
aug 25, 2025, 10:44 am • 0 0 • view
A more realistic conceptual model for an urban housing market like London is as a series of city wide layers based on price point rather than a number of separate but internally integrated neighbourhood markets
aug 25, 2025, 10:47 am • 0 0 • view
This is easy to see simply by running community detection algorithms on domestic migration and housing transaction data, this is how functional housing market areas are constructed in the first place. We've been doing this for years, it's common practice
aug 25, 2025, 10:54 am • 0 0 • view
I think the evidence is that building any grade of housing effects the whole chain, because people are moving all along it. I hate "luxury flats" discourse it's so unhelpful.
aug 25, 2025, 7:37 am • 2 0 • view
The 'whole chain' thing is pure fantasy. An urban housing market is so large that the effect of even a large housing development is effectively negligible in supply terms, so any effects are swamped by other mechanisms
aug 25, 2025, 7:45 am • 0 0 • view
This !!!
aug 25, 2025, 7:28 am • 1 0 • view