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Specialist landlords rising, brokers in demand
Accidental landlords are exiting, specialist portfolios and limited companies are moving centre stage and international capital keeps flowing into UK property. In a volatile BTL market, brokers are developing from simple rate hunters to strategic partners
Paul Roberts
Family Building Society
Industry experts
Martin Sims
Molo Finance
Paul Roberts is a senior account director at Family Building Society, responsible for the development of business relationships with networks, key accounts, packagers, mortgage intermediaries and IFAs. With over 37 years’ experience in financial services, Roberts delivers innovative solutions, often for those clients with complex situations and income, all with a big emphasis on excellent customer service. Outside of work, Roberts retains his strong connection with cricket, having played to a high standard and now an ECB Premier League umpire in Yorkshire. He’s been selected for the ECB Pathways program to potentially be promoted to the ECB National Panel of Umpires.
Family Building Society
Paul Roberts
Martin Sims is an experienced financial services professional skilled in business planning, sales, management and marketing. He played pivotal roles in startup teams for major institutions like Legal & General Bank, Castle Trust and United Trust Bank, specialising in intermediary engagement. Sims boasts strong startup credentials, having successfully launched a VoIP telephony platform business from concept to sale. He is deeply passionate about adding value and fostering personal growth.
Molo Finance
Martin Sims
“The expat market is growing because more and more people are emigrating. We’ve seen strong demand from those markets for UK property”
Paul Roberts,
Family Building Society
IN AN environment where “a week feels like a month and a month like a year,” as Martin Sims, distribution director at Molo Finance, views it, the warning is clear: we treat UK buy-to-let (BTL) as business as usual at your peril. From tax changes and regulatory reform to a shortage of property, plus persistent volatility matched by unprecedented opportunity across the globe, the BTL market is changing, and it is changing fast.
While some accidental landlords are finding the new landscape too fraught to continue, many portfolio landlords are seizing the shift toward limited company structures and new horizons in expat and international markets. For brokers, that means more complexity to unpick – but also more value to add.
In the next 12–24 months – “assuming we know what will happen in the next 12–24 hours,” Sims notes – established landlords will hold some properties, dispose of others and actively seek out more of what they believe are the best options, moving forward.
“No one is carrying on with the status quo, and this requires intermediaries to walk clients through all of the options available,” he says. “We are seeing lots of concern and uncertainty, but brokers thrive in those environments. We’ve seen it before; it is what intermediaries do best. Likewise, good lenders will dig out and build on these opportunities.”
The state of the world has translated into a much more light-footed approach when it comes to what Molo offers. As the lender waits for the next swap rate change or to “see what expletives Donald Trump puts out overnight,” Sims notes that clients need a broker by their side to translate the noise.
“Intermediary clients are people too, and they’re watching the same news that we are; they have got the same feelings we feel,” he says. “We are seeing the intermediated part of the process becoming ever more important.”
Roberts agrees, pointing out that Family Building Society is “95% intermediary driven – we’re there for the broker rather than a direct option from a customer’s point of view.” With that in mind, the lender recently rolled out a new expanded and reduced-rate product set that underpins its wide distribution.
Whether an expat, a portfolio landlord or the more standard BTL landlord with HMOs or smaller multi-unit freehold blocks, “there are opportunities for customers to come to us via our intermediary partners,” Roberts says.
Specialist BTL: the rise ‘from peripheral to core’ In the expat space, Roberts describes the market as “very open.” He points to rising enquiries from some of his largest clients, specialist expat brokers, who have people wanting to extend portfolios and make that move from personal to limited company ownership. They’re also increasingly keen to establish or expand staff in key overseas locations.
With the BTL market firmly established, products are catching up – which they must do, agree Roberts and Sims.
“Specialist BTL was peripheral and now it’s core, certainly in the UK,” says the latter. He points to novel situations that are cropping up: for example, a young adult choosing to get on the ladder as a first-time homebuyer and landlord simultaneously, by renting out the property and staying home with mum and dad for a longer period.
Market snapshot: who’s in, who’s out Paul Roberts, senior account director at Family Building Society, recognises the same pattern. Between measures such as the Renters’ Rights agenda and the tax implications of simply keeping a property running, it’s unsustainable for smaller players.
“If I was an accidental landlord at the moment,” Roberts notes, “I’d be looking to exit the market too.”
The market can be explained by a simple 2x2 grid: new entrants versus experienced landlords on one axis and those looking to gear up versus those looking to gear down on the other. Sitting in the middle is a “holding ground” of landlords sustaining themselves with established portfolios. That core segment, where investors are neither exiting nor just dabbling, is where lenders see the sweet spot.
“Hopefully – and I use that as carefully as I can – things have started to settle down. But let’s see what tomorrow brings.”
As it stands, brokers are fielding endless queries from clients trying to make sense of constant change. This puts pressure on them to be genuinely expert in the BTL space, particularly when they stray beyond straightforward domestic cases.
A few years ago, Roberts notes, BTL was just a standard product set. Now, limited company BTLs make up the lion’s share: he estimates it’s over 50% of all business written. The same trend is also picking up in the burgeoning expat space, and it falls to intermediaries to understand, advise on and execute this shift “in a structured and correct manner.”
Overall, the current state of BTL demands more from brokers, who must be “on their mettle,” Sims says, as any adviser merely dabbling in the deeper waters will be found out quickly.
BTL lending and yields
With the domestic market being run through the mill, international and expat investors are steadily taking up a bigger piece of the BTL market. Over the past two years, Molo has worked with the international segment as it has been growing rapidly, running close at lender level, to a 50/50 split between domestic and overseas. The bedrock of that business was early demand in Asia, served by fluent Mandarin- and Cantonese-speaking international BDMs.
As the market matures, the geography continues to widen: Sims points to growing interest from Turkey and parts of mainland Europe; this is reflected in intermediary enquiries with investors in places such as the Netherlands looking to the UK for opportunity that they can’t find at home. Canada and the US are also making inroads, viewing the UK as a comparatively safe and stable destination for property investment.
Expat demand is evolving in parallel. Roberts notes that many intermediary firms he works with have opened international offices in popular hubs such as Dubai, South Africa and Hong Kong, tracking UK nationals who are moving abroad in greater numbers.
“The expat market is growing because more and more people are emigrating,” he says. “We’ve seen strong demand from those markets for UK property.”
Together, these trends reinforce that while accidental landlords may be retreating, professional domestic landlords, expats and international investors are marshalling forward.
Read on
The takeaway? This is no arena for generalists; in Molo’s experience, international-focused intermediaries are “laser-sharp” by design. The advent of specialist teams builds credibility, with lenders and borrowers respecting their input. As everyone becomes comfortable, business flows through that conduit.
“The basic alchemy is the same: seeing enough cases to know what good looks like, spotting patterns and frequency and using those insights to shape better outcomes,” Sims notes, adding that it cuts both ways. As the market continues to roll, it is brokers who help steer development of the next generation of BTL lender solutions.
“That was an innovation in the market, to meet new demands,” Sims says. “No one really likes change, but you really have nothing but change around us currently. It just needs to be transferred into opportunity wherever we can.”
Roberts agrees, adding that the market is desperate for outside-the-box products. As much as intermediaries are adjusting their sails, so must lenders: it’s no time to stand still. From property refinancing to addressing the need for repairs or alignment with green initiatives, “we’ve got to try to cover everything; we’ve got to support the housing market we’ve got.”
Family Building Society is the UK’s 11th-largest building society, with over 69,000 members and £2.7bn of assets. As a mutual organisation, we’re owned by our saving and borrowing members, with over 80% of borrowings raised by deposits from individuals. Our mortgage products are underwritten by a team who look at each case on an individual basis based on common-sense and tailored credit checks rather than credit scoring. We’re proud to have been awarded Legendary Lender by Knowledge Bank in 2026, recognising us as a lender who consistently goes above and beyond for brokers through outstanding service, support and criteria clarity. We also have a 5* broker rating from Smart Money People.
Molo is a specialist mortgage lender for both UK and overseas customers. Since launching in 2018, we’ve led change in the UK mortgage market and have processed over £2 billion in mortgage applications through our platform. Our mission is to make the mortgage experience more transparent and aligned with the needs of modern landlords, using technology to streamline key processes to support quicker, more consistent decisions. We’ve won several awards for Best Digital Mortgage Lender at the Fintech Awards and Best Online Mortgage Lender at the Lending Awards. Molo is a wholly owned subsidiary of ColCap Financial UK Limited.
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Published 11 May 2026
“No one really likes change, but you really have nothing but change around us currently. It just needs to be transferred into opportunity wherever we can”
Martin Sims,
Molo Finance
In Q4 2025, there were 59,489 new buy-to-let loans advanced in the UK, worth £11.2bn – up 18.2% by number and 21.3% by value on the same quarter a year earlier, with growth largely in remortgage activity
The average gross buy-to-let rental yield in the UK was 7.18% in Q4 2025, up from 6.99% in Q4 2024
The average interest rate across all new buy-to-let loans was 4.77% in Q4 2025, 8 bps lower than the previous quarter and 32 bps lower than Q4 2024
Source: UK Finance, Buy to Let Mortgage Market Update, Q4 2025
Around 86.5% of UK mortgage lending by value in 2025 is done via intermediaries/brokers (about £204.5bn out of £288bn total lending)
Broker share of UK mortgages
Source: Intermediary Mortgage Lenders Association (IMLA), “The new ‘normal’ – prospects for 2026 and 2027” (UK mortgage market outlook, 2025)
IMLA notes that the intermediated share has stabilised at roughly 87% over the last couple of years and is expected to remain around this level in 2026 and 2027
From rate hunters to strategic partners As landlord profiles change, so does the nature of advice. For brokers, the challenge is no longer sourcing the sharpest rate on a vanilla BTL; it’s helping clients decide whether to exit or expand, whether to incorporate and how to structure increasingly complex portfolios.
Both Sims and Roberts are clear that in this landscape, a solid grasp of the market at home and abroad – and the ability to communicate various nuances clearly – is what separates the intermediaries who simply process applications from those who become long-term strategic partners.
“The world will keep on changing, and as lenders, we must get ahead of it – we’ve got to be at the forefront,” Roberts says. “In terms of the BTL market, refurb-type products will be paramount going forward.”
To support brokers in this environment, the focus is not limited to products. Sims is candid that lenders across the board have been tested lately, and it is the service that has been at full stretch. Molo strives for consistency to ensure that products are always available to brokers for their clients, “to keep a pendulum swinging; a beat going,” and aims to only improve from here.
Family Building Society is also ramping up on this front. While in a perfect world, there would be no pulled products or short-notice responses, “March has shown how it can all go to pot,” Roberts says.
Ultimately, brokers and lenders are stronger together: this is the era for doubling down on cooperation, and lenders like Molo and Family Building Society are here for it.
“Intermediaries just want peace of mind, and we want to give that to you,” Roberts sums up. “Whether it’s a phone call, BDMs on the ground or available account managers – we’re here for any questions that are thrown at you.”
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