34 Years, 450+ HMOs: What Three Decades in South Yorkshire HMOs Actually Teaches You
September 2, 2026
As you can imagine, 34 years in property has taught us an awful lot.
We have seen financial crashes and weathered them. We have seen interest rates at levels which made borrowing feel almost free, then watched them move sharply the other way. We have seen plenty of Prime Ministers too, although whether that particular statistic is worth celebrating is another matter. More importantly for investors, we have watched entire areas of the UK suddenly become the latest place everyone supposedly needed to buy an HMO, only for interest to fall away almost as quickly once too many investors, developers and deal packagers piled into the same streets.
Throughout all of that, South Yorkshire has remained at the centre of what we do.
We have continued to see strong investor demand for South Yorkshire HMO investments through completely different property cycles, lending environments and regulatory changes. There is something quite telling about that. We have spent years telling investors that a sensible HMO strategy does not need to revolve around whichever city is receiving the most attention online. It needs good underlying property, a professional tenant market, sensible acquisition costs, proper development work and management which understands exactly how an HMO operates after the builders leave.
After more than 450 HMO developments, those principles have not changed very much.
A cheap refurbishment is rarely cheap for long
One lesson became obvious very early in our time developing HMOs: these properties cannot be developed properly by doing the absolute minimum.
A five or six-bedroom professional HMO places considerably more demand on a building than the average family house. The electrics work harder, the plumbing works harder, hot water demand increases, bathrooms are used far more frequently and every part of the property sees heavier day-to-day use. Leaving old infrastructure in place because it still technically works on refurbishment day can create a false economy which the investor eventually pays for through repairs, disruption and lost income.
Our refurbishments are therefore far more involved than putting down new flooring, fitting a kitchen and painting the bedrooms.
Depending on the property, work can include new electrics, plumbing, pipework, damp proofing, plastering, flooring, heating systems, windows, kitchens, ensuites, extensions, fire protection, landscaping and garden works. We are developing the building around its future use rather than relying on decades-old services which were originally installed for a completely different type of household.
That approach costs more than a cosmetic refurbishment. It is supposed to.
The investment still needs to be producing income years after the photographs have been taken and the property has been handed over. Saving money by leaving ageing infrastructure buried behind newly plastered walls is not something we have ever considered particularly clever.
Fully ensuite stopped being optional a long time ago
We have also learned exactly what professional HMO tenants expect from modern accommodation.
Every HMO we develop is fully ensuite.
There are still developers trying to make deals work by squeezing another bedroom into a property while leaving tenants with shared bathrooms. It might improve the projected gross rent on a spreadsheet, but there is very little value in creating an extra bedroom if the finished property becomes less attractive to the people expected to rent it.
Professional tenants have choices.
A good-sized room with its own bathroom, proper storage, sensible communal space and a well-finished kitchen is simply a stronger product than a cramped bedroom in a house where several strangers are sharing facilities. We have never been interested in cramming the maximum theoretical number of tenants into every building.
Sometimes five excellent rooms make far more sense than six compromised ones.
That judgement becomes easier after managing large numbers of tenants because you see the consequences of design decisions in real use. Tenant complaints, maintenance patterns, occupancy, room preferences and retention all tell you far more than a development appraisal ever will.
Managing 650 tenants every month keeps us accountable
We currently manage around 650 tenants every month on behalf of our investors.
That part of the business has shaped the way we develop properties just as much as the construction side has.
There is a lot of loose language around “end-to-end” HMO investment. A developer can acquire a building, refurbish it, furnish it and then hand the property to an unrelated lettings agent while still describing the investment as fully managed.
The problem is that the management company had no involvement in how the property was designed or developed.
The agent might also be managing ordinary family houses, apartments, student lets and other residential stock at the same time. HMO management becomes another service sitting among everything else they do, despite the fact that running a professional HMO properly requires far more attention than collecting rent from a standard single let.
Every HMO we develop is managed by our own in-house lettings operation.
That team manages the investments we develop for our investors. Their work is centred around those properties and the tenants living in them, which means there is nowhere for problems to disappear between separate companies.
If a design choice causes an issue, we hear about it. If a particular fitting performs badly, we hear about it. If tenants consistently respond better to one room layout than another, that information works its way back through the business.
Thirty-four years gives you experience, but managing hundreds of tenants continuously gives you live information as well.
Property gurus have come and gone
We have seen plenty of property strategies become fashionable over the years, and social media has accelerated that process considerably.
One thing we would tell investors very clearly is not to base a long-term investment strategy around the latest property guru, course seller or social media personality.
A surprisingly large part of the modern property industry revolves around selling people a method rather than owning and managing property for the long term.
During periods of very cheap debt, aggressive refinancing and heavy leverage were often presented as if they were the only intelligent way to invest. Buy a property, refurbish it, refinance quickly, extract as much capital as possible and repeat the process.
It looks very different once borrowing costs increase.
We are not financial advisers and do not pretend to be. What we do tell investors is to use leverage sensibly and make sure the investment still works under less favourable lending conditions.
If the entire deal depends on an ambitious end valuation, maximum borrowing and permanently low interest rates, there is very little room for error.
We have seen enough market cycles to know that conditions change.
The tenant is often nowhere near the city centre
Another assumption we have watched investors make repeatedly is that the closer a property sits to a major city centre, the stronger the HMO demand must be.
Our experience in South Yorkshire has never supported such a simple view.
Professional tenants often choose accommodation around employment rather than nightlife or a city-centre postcode. Large logistics sites, industrial estates, warehouses, distribution centres, hospitals and major employment corridors generate a substantial amount of rental demand outside traditional city centres.
Parking matters too.
So does being close to major roads. So does having enough space for a proper kitchen, useful communal areas, decent bedrooms and a garden.
Those things are often easier to provide away from expensive central locations where housing stock becomes smaller, acquisition prices rise and developers start compromising layouts purely to make the numbers fit.
South Yorkshire gives us access to exactly the type of property we like developing: houses which can physically support five or six proper ensuite bedrooms without turning every available square metre into lettable space.
The building has to work first.
Oversaturation eventually reaches the rent
We have also spent enough time in the HMO market to recognise what happens when too many people chase the same location.
Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Newcastle have all seen substantial levels of HMO development and investor attention over a prolonged period.
We have deliberately remained cautious around heavily supplied markets because oversaturation does not normally appear overnight as one dramatic event. It gradually works its way into the economics.
More rooms become available.
Tenants gain more choice.
One landlord reduces a room rate to get somebody in. Another property nearby follows. Incentives start appearing, void periods become harder to hide and eventually the original rent assumptions used to sell investments become much less convincing.
Cheap property can make that risk easy to overlook because the headline yield still appears attractive.
We would rather operate in areas where we understand the existing supply, the type of tenant renting there and the level of new HMO development taking place around us.
South Yorkshire is not immune from poor HMO decisions. There are properties and streets we would reject immediately.
That distinction matters because we have never treated South Yorkshire as one huge investment area where every postcode works equally well.
More experience usually means saying no more often
A strange thing happens as a developer gains more experience.
You become less interested in trying to make every property work.
There are houses where another developer might squeeze in an additional bedroom, remove communal space or accept weak parking because they need the acquisition to stack up.
We would rather walk away.
We reject properties because bedrooms would be too small, extensions do not work properly, parking is inadequate, the garden cannot be made useful, surrounding supply is too high or the tenant market simply does not justify the investment.
The ability to reject a deal is one of the most useful things 34 years in property teaches you.
A developer under pressure to keep selling opportunities eventually starts trying to make the wrong buildings fit the model. We have never believed that every cheap house should become an HMO.
The property itself needs to deserve the investment.
South Yorkshire has stayed relatively boring, which suits us
There have been periods where other parts of the country looked far more exciting from the outside.
New investment hotspots appear regularly. Attractive brochures are produced, social media fills with case studies and investors start competing for the same stock.
We have kept developing in South Yorkshire.
That consistency is not accidental.
We understand the property stock, we know where our professional tenant demand comes from, we understand the practicalities of managing properties locally and we have years of evidence showing us which types of houses perform properly.
Our strategy has never required South Yorkshire to suddenly become fashionable.
It needs employment, sensible housing costs, good transport connections and tenants who want good quality rooms.
Those fundamentals have lasted far longer than most property trends.
What 450+ HMOs actually changes
Developing more than 450 HMOs does not teach you one clever secret.
It teaches you hundreds of small things which gradually alter the way you assess property.
You become less impressed by high gross yields and far more interested in what remains after management, utilities, maintenance and realistic occupancy. You start paying closer attention to drainage routes, electrical capacity, parking and bedroom proportions before spending too much time discussing paint colours. You learn that a good tenant experience usually comes from boring practical details being done properly rather than expensive furniture or fashionable interior design.
Most of all, you learn that property investment rewards consistency.
Build the HMO properly. Do not rely on ancient infrastructure. Give professional tenants their own bathrooms. Avoid forcing bedrooms into houses which cannot comfortably support them. Keep management accountable. Use borrowing sensibly. Do not chase a location because somebody online has suddenly decided it is the next big thing.
That is not a particularly glamorous investment philosophy.
It has, however, survived 34 years, several property cycles and more than 450 HMO developments.
South Yorkshire has remained a central part of that story throughout.
To view our current fully managed HMO developments, visit: