This isn’t a long-term problem on the horizon. It’s already here.

Alto published data this week showing that just 1 in 10 new build homes completed in England in 2024/25 reached the open market.

Of an estimated 200,000 new properties built that year, only 21,261 entered the sales channel where buyers search and agents transact. The rest went to build-to-rent portfolios, developer direct sales or affordable housing allocations.

In London, the figure is 2.12%. In the North West, 7.51%. Even in the South West – the strongest-performing region – it sits at 17%.

These aren’t rounding errors. They’re the output of a structural reallocation of housing supply that has been building for years, and it isn’t reversing. Build-to-rent portfolios are held long-term. They don’t churn, they don’t get re-instructed, they don’t generate repeat transactional opportunity. Once absorbed into institutional ownership, that stock leaves the competitive open market for good.

This is a sprint, not a marathon. If you’re leaving it a couple of years before you start thinking about what this means for your business, you’re already behind.

I’d add to that: the agents who are going to feel this most aren’t the ones who can’t see the problem. They’re the ones who can see it clearly and are responding to the wrong version of it.

The wrong diagnosis

When I talk to agency owners about what’s holding them back, the conversation almost always starts in the same place. They need more people. More negotiators, more property managers, more admin support. The business is running hot and there aren’t enough hands.

I understand that instinct. But in most cases, it’s the wrong call. When you actually look at how teams spend their time — and I mean really map it, task by task, click by click — a different picture emerges.

Research suggests agents are losing around eight hours a week to tasks that could already be automated. That’s ten full working weeks a year, per person, on work that doesn’t require a skilled negotiator to do it.

A third to half of a typical negotiator’s week, in many agencies, is non-revenue work. They’re not winning instructions. They’re keeping the operation running — chasing solicitors, qualifying leads manually, processing certificates, managing the admin behind a deal that could largely run itself.

“Most agencies think they have a hiring problem. They don’t. They have an admin problem. And the distinction matters because hiring more people into a fragmented, manual operation doesn’t fix the problem, it furthers it.

The framing I find useful here is to think about what your business is actually being hired to do. Every agency has a set of core jobs of work – the tasks your team completes day in, day out. Creating a listing. Progressing a sale. Renewing a certificate. Qualifying a lead. Reconciling accounts.

The question worth asking is: how many of those jobs of work actually require the people doing them? And of the ones that don’t — how many are consuming the headspace of people who should be in front of clients?

That’s where the real inefficiency lives. Not in headcount. In the friction that’s eating your team’s time and attention.

What a tighter market actually exposes

In a strong market, operational inefficiency is expensive but survivable. Volume covers a lot of cracks. Margins are thinner than they should be, progression takes longer than it needs to, but the deals still close and the business still grows.

A structurally tighter market removes that buffer. When available stock shrinks and competition for every instruction intensifies, the businesses that were masking weak operations with high volume start to feel it. The cracks don’t get papered over. They get wider.

This is why I think the question of how agents respond to the supply shift is really a question about operational discipline. Not working harder — working smarter. Knowing which contacts in your database are most likely to move before they’ve told anyone. Responding to every inbound lead quickly and consistently, not depending on whoever picks up the phone first. Managing compliance as a system, not a checklist someone might miss.

None of that requires more people. It requires better infrastructure and sharper use of the data that most agencies are already sitting on.

The data advantage most agents are ignoring

Here’s something that often gets missed. The agencies with the richest operational history — the deepest records of applicants, vendors, landlords, transactions, outcomes built up over years — are sitting on a genuine competitive advantage. They just aren’t using it.

Every applicant who hasn’t bought yet. Every landlord relationship built over a decade. Every vendor you valued three years ago who still hasn’t listed. That data, properly activated, tells you where your next instructions are coming from before anyone else knows. The signals are there. The problem is that most agencies are too busy managing operational friction to surface them.

The role of technology in this isn’t to replace the judgment of a good agent. It’s to clear the path so that judgment can actually be applied — to get rid of the admin, the paperwork, the wasted headspace, so agents can do what they’re actually there to do. The agencies winning in a tighter market aren’t the biggest or the loudest. They’re the ones who have cleared enough headspace to actually see their business clearly — and act on it.

What this moment requires

I want to be honest about what I think this demands of the industry, because I don’t think the polite version serves anyone.

The structural changes in housing supply are not reversing. The compliance burden is not lightening. Consumer expectations are not lowering. Waiting for the market to improve as a strategy has a meaningful cost – it’s just a slower one than most people account for.

The agencies that come out of this period in the strongest position will be the ones that used it deliberately. That tightened their operations, not just their belts. That invested in understanding where their business is actually coming from and where their team’s time is actually going.

A tighter open market doesn’t make estate agency less valuable – it makes the skill of a good agent more important, not less. But advisory value can’t sit on top of a fragile operation. The foundations have to be right.

The ones building those foundations now are going to be in a very different position in three years from the ones that are still waiting for things to go back to the way they were.

They won’t.

Riccardo Iannucci-Dawson is CEO of Alto, a CRM for estate and lettings agencies. 

Hidden housing supply: Where are all the new homes going?