If you have run an agency in Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Cheshire or Lancashire for twenty years, you have probably sat through at least one conversation in which someone from the South East explained your own market to you. Usually it involves the word “affordable”.
Here is the actual position. The North West is the strongest-performing housing market in England, and it is not close.
What the numbers say about the North West right now
The June 2026 UK House Price Index, published on 19 August, put annual price growth in the North West at 4.7% — the highest of any English region — against a UK average of 2.0% and a London market that fell 2.5% over the same period. The regional average price was £220,000.
Price growth is the least interesting part of it. Two other figures matter far more to anyone buying an agency here.
Your properties sell. Rightmove’s House Price Index on 21 September found that 71% of homes coming to market in the North West find a buyer, against 61% nationally. That is a ten-point gap in conversion, in a month when national buyer enquiries were down 9% year-on-year, agreed sales were down 9%, and the number of homes for sale hit a twelve-year high.
And they sell faster once agreed. TwentyEA data reported on 16 September showed 47.6% of North West sales reach exchange within three months, compared with 35.4% in Inner London and 31.1% in Outer London. The North East (58.4%) and Yorkshire (55.6%) do better still.
Put those together and you have the thing an acquirer actually cares about, which is not turnover but the reliability of the pipeline behind it. A business that converts 71% of instructions and exchanges nearly half of them inside a quarter has a shorter cash cycle and a smaller fall-through risk than a nominally larger business in the South East. That is a real, defensible argument to make in a sale process, and most North West owners never make it because they have been told for years that their market is the cheap one.
Who is actually buying in the North West
Not everybody who says they are acquiring is acquiring here. These are the buyers with a demonstrated North West record.
The consolidators who are already on the ground
Lomond is the most active. Its Manchester hub brands — Thornley Groves and Julian Wadden — have been buying in Greater Manchester for years. In February 2025 Lomond acquired Edward Mellor’s lettings book, around 900 managed properties across Stockport, Tameside and Manchester, splitting them between the two brands. Edward Mellor kept its estate agency business. Ed Phillips, Lomond’s chief executive, was blunt about the logic: “By acquiring the lettings arm of the business, we’ve acquired a competitor within the Greater Manchester area and so this deal strengthens our presence considerably.”
Lomond has since passed 150 branches and 72,000 managed properties nationally, and more than 70 completed acquisitions, following its purchase of Bristol’s Ocean Property Services Group in September. Its North West rental portfolio passed 7,000 units after it absorbed the Manchester, Liverpool and Chester operations of Rendall & Rittner Sales & Letting into Thornley Groves. Jason Watkin, Lomond’s North West chief executive, described the region as “a key rental heartland for us”. He is not being polite. Lomond is ICG-backed, having been bought for £450m in December 2024, and the North West is where a meaningful share of that capital has gone.
Leaders Romans Group arrived at scale in November 2025 by acquiring Northern Estate Agencies Group — 36 branches and 400 staff across Lancashire, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire and Derbyshire, trading as Manning Stainton, Ryder & Dutton and Mortimers, on roughly £10m of turnover. LRG’s M&A director Matthew Light placed it alongside Chancellors, Acorn and Stirling Ackroyd as one of the group’s most significant deals. That is a large buyer that has just built a northern platform and now has branches to fill in.
The lettings-only platforms
Dwelly has been the most acquisitive lettings buyer in the country this year — ten deals by September. Its Manchester footprint came through Settio, acquired in June 2026 as its seventh deal of 2026, adding more than 2,000 managed properties and around £600m of managed assets across Manchester, Birmingham, London and Singapore.
Dwelly buys lettings books and leaves the sales business behind. It did exactly that with AP Morgan in the West Midlands in July, taking 500 managed units while the founders kept the sales operation. As Martin Bunney of The Business Acquisitions Group put it in Property Industry Eye on 9 September: “The clearest pattern is that the acquisition of lettings books is now favoured over entire agencies.”
If you run a mixed sales-and-lettings business in the North West, that is the single most important sentence in this post. You are probably going to be priced in two halves, and there are more buyers competing for one half than the other. We covered the underlying reasons for that in why a lettings book is the asset.
The student specialists
This is the part of the North West market that genuinely does not exist in most of the country, and it produced the two most visible regional deals of 2026.
loc8me acquired Luxury Student Homes in Liverpool on 20 May — 199 properties, more than 1,100 beds, 25 staff — taking its Liverpool portfolio from roughly 400 beds to about 1,500. Co-founder Neil Colquhoun agreed to stay involved for five years. Then on 23 September it acquired Mighty Student Living in Lancaster and Galgate: 350+ properties, another 1,100+ beds, 19 staff, and loc8me’s twentieth university city.
Manchester, Liverpool, Lancaster, Preston, Salford and Chester between them hold one of the densest concentrations of student housing in Europe. If a meaningful slice of your managed book is student stock, you have a second, entirely separate buyer pool that a Home Counties agency does not. Peter Charnley, who sold Mighty, said the thing most sellers feel and few say out loud: “Finding the right home for the team and our landlords was much more important to me than simply completing a deal.”
The local independents
They are still buying, and they are often the better cultural fit. Normie & Co, a 45-year-old Prestwich independent, bought Jennie Platt Estates in July 2024, taking its managed book to around 600 units in North Manchester. Josh Gertler framed it as buying “a wealth of experience and local market knowledge” rather than buying units.
A local buyer will rarely be the highest bidder. They will sometimes be the one who keeps your staff, your name over the door and your relationships with landlords who have been with you since the nineties. Whether that matters is your call, but it should be a call you make deliberately rather than by default. The full national picture is in who is buying UK estate and letting agencies in 2026.
The three regional facts that will shape your sale
1. Build-to-rent has already reshaped Manchester — and it is stalling
Manchester and Salford have delivered 18,700 build-to-rent homes with another 5,200 in the pipeline: the largest BTR market outside London. Those are the RE:UK Build-to-Rent Report figures for Q2 2026, published on 3 August.
The second half of that report is the part nobody in the North West has priced in yet. UK BTR starts on site fell 79% in the year to June 2026, and regional starts outside London fell 84% — from 13,893 homes to 2,176. Homes under construction were down 21%. It was the tenth consecutive quarter in which completions exceeded starts.
For an agency owner, that cuts two ways and you need to know which way it cuts for you. If a large share of your lettings income comes from managing units in new city-centre blocks, a buyer will look at that pipeline chart and ask what happens to your growth when the completions stop. If your book is suburban houses in Sale, Heaton Moor, Crosby or Didsbury, the drying-up of BTR supply makes your stock scarcer and your landlords stickier. Same region, opposite conclusions.
2. Licensing is now a Merseyside timing question
Liverpool is running one of the most consequential licensing consultations in the country.
The city’s current selective licensing scheme covers 16 wards and roughly 80% of its privately rented homes. It expires in March 2027. In May the council approved a consultation on what replaces it, offering three options: a citywide scheme across 64 wards, a deprivation-based scheme across 29 wards, or a poor-property-conditions scheme across 26 wards. Proposed fees run to no fewer than twelve bands, up to £995 per property. The consultation runs until October 2026.
The existing scheme has processed over 56,000 applications since April 2022 and granted more than 48,000 licences, off the back of 19,000-plus inspections, 3,500 identified hazards and over 1,100 enforcement notices. Councillor Hetty Wood, the cabinet member for housing, called the consultation “an important next step, giving residents and landlords the chance to shape how we continue that work”.
Manchester is on the same trajectory, with selective licensing designations continuing to expand across the city and schemes moving out of their awareness periods into active enforcement.
Read that as a seller rather than as a landlord. Licensing administration is one of the few parts of your business that is genuinely hard for an acquirer to replicate. An agency that can demonstrate it has every licensable property in its book correctly licensed, with renewal dates tracked and a process for new designations, is selling a compliance capability, not just a rent roll. An agency that cannot is selling a diligence problem. On Merseyside specifically, whoever buys your book in 2027 inherits whatever Liverpool decides this autumn — which is a reason to have your licensing position documented now, whichever side of March 2027 you go to market.
3. The Renters’ Rights Act landed on a region with unusually deep PRS penetration
The tenancy reforms commenced on 1 May 2026. Nationally, Propertymark’s members reported around eight tenant applicants for every available rental property, on about twelve available properties per branch. Zoopla’s September report put UK rents up 2.6% annually with 3% fewer homes available than a year ago.
The North West’s exposure to that is higher than most regions because of the size of its city-centre and student PRS. We set out what the Act has done to managed-book value in the Renters’ Rights Act and agency valuations, and the short version holds here: the Act made a managed book harder to run and more valuable to own.
What a North West buyer will ask that a Surrey buyer would not
Five questions worth being able to answer before you take a call:
- What is your stock mix by property type? City-centre apartments and suburban houses behave completely differently on churn, fees and arrears. A single blended figure hides the answer.
- What is your licensing exposure, by postcode? Not “we’re compliant” — the actual schedule, with renewal dates and which designations you sit inside.
- How concentrated is your landlord base? North West books often carry portfolio and overseas investor landlords. Five landlords holding 30% of your units is a different business from 200 landlords holding the same units, and a buyer will find out either way.
- How much of your growth came from new-build instructions? With regional BTR starts down 84%, a buyer will want to know how much of your recent pipeline is repeatable.
- What is your student seasonality? If it is material, say so early. It narrows your buyer pool and widens what the right buyer will do.
None of these are trick questions. They are simply the questions that get asked about a North West business, and the owners who have the answers ready run shorter, calmer processes. If you want the broader framework first, start with how much an estate agency is worth and the tax position in tax when selling an estate agency.
How we can help
The Acquisitions Group specialises in selling estate and letting agencies, and the team has acquired 156+ businesses in ten years. We have sat on the buyer’s side of the table, which is why we know which questions are coming.
If you want an indicative view of what your business is worth in the current North West market, our free valuation tool takes a few minutes. If you would rather talk it through confidentially — including whether your book is better sold whole or in halves — get in touch. No obligation, nothing leaves the room, and we will tell you if now is the wrong time.
Sources
- UK House Price Index for June 2026, GOV.UK, published 19 August 2026
- Rightmove House Price Index, 21 September 2026, reported by The Intermediary
- “Revealed: where property sales reach exchange fastest and slowest”, TwentyEA data reported by Property Industry Eye, 16 September 2026
- “Lomond strikes third acquisition of the year with Edward Mellor deal”, Property Industry Eye, 13 February 2025
- “Lomond snaps up competitor agent’s lettings book in North West”, The Negotiator, 13 February 2025
- “Lomond acquires another major regional agency”, Estate Agent Today, 3 September 2026
- “72,000 units under management as agency acquisition revealed”, Letting Agent Today, 4 September 2026
- “Lomond further expands North West coverage”, Lomond Group press release
- “City investment firm buys lettings giant Lomond for £450m”, The Negotiator, 2 December 2024
- “LRG acquires Northern Estate Agencies Group”, Leaders Romans Group announcement, 3 November 2025
- “Industry blue chip snaps up £10m turnover northern estate agency group”, The Negotiator, 3 November 2025
- “Dwelly acquires £600m property firm in seventh deal of 2026”, TheBusinessDesk North West, 26 June 2026
- “Agency’s 8th acquisition this year adds 500 properties to portfolio”, Letting Agent Today, 16 July 2026
- “Lettings portfolios become hot property in estate agency acquisition race”, Property Industry Eye, 9 September 2026
- “Student lettings agency expands national portfolio through acquisition”, Property Industry Eye, 20 May 2026
- “Agency hits 20-city milestone with Mighty acquisition”, Property Industry Eye, 23 September 2026
- “Independent estate agency acquires rival firm”, Property Industry Eye, 22 July 2024
- RE:UK Build-to-Rent Report Q2 2026, Real Estate:UK, 3 August 2026
- “Liverpool considers extending selective licensing scheme city-wide”, The Negotiator, 8 May 2026
- “Council licensing proposals have 12 different fees up to £995”, Landlord Today, 30 July 2026
- Propertymark Housing Insight Report (May 2026 data), published 28 July 2026
- Zoopla Rental Market Report, 14 September 2026