What makes Doncaster a leading place for HMO investment?

August 20, 2026

Property investment has a habit of becoming most fashionable once much of the easy money has already been made. Prices rise, yields tighten, regeneration becomes obvious and only then does everybody start talking about the area as the next place to invest.

Our view of Doncaster comes from a very different place.

As property developers, we have been developing and managing HMO properties for investors, and for ourselves, for over 34 years. We have worked through different property cycles, different interest-rate environments, recessions, lending changes, shifts in tenant behaviour and more than a few areas that were supposedly going to become the next great property hotspot.

Doncaster has stood the test of time for us, and it continues to do so.

There is already enough economic evidence to show that the city has been moving in the right direction, but some of the largest employment and infrastructure projects affecting Doncaster are still being built out. That is a much more interesting position for an investor than arriving after every major improvement has happened and property values have adjusted accordingly.

Doncaster’s economic output grew by 4.4% between 2013 and 2023, according to Centre for Cities, against national average growth of 2.4% over the same period. The city’s own monitoring also recorded a net increase of 5,643 full-time equivalent jobs between 2015 and 2023, equivalent to employment growth of 5.2%.

Those are not forecasts attached to glossy development brochures. They are changes that have already happened.

For us as HMO developers, that matters because demand for rooms eventually comes back to something fairly basic: people need jobs, employers need workers, and those workers need somewhere sensible to live.

Doncaster does not need students to keep its HMO market alive

This is one of the biggest differences between Doncaster and many traditional HMO locations.

We are not dependent on students.

There are towns and cities around Britain where the HMO market is tied very closely to the university calendar. Remove enough student demand, increase purpose-built student accommodation or change where students decide to live and suddenly a sizeable part of the local HMO market starts looking considerably less comfortable.

We have never wanted an investment model that needs students as some form of HMO life support.

Our Doncaster properties are predominantly aimed at working tenants: people employed in logistics, warehousing, engineering, manufacturing, construction, healthcare, transport, rail, aviation, professional services and the large employment sites around the city.

That creates a completely different type of demand. People start jobs in February. They relocate in June. Contracts begin in November. Relationships end, careers change and employers recruit throughout the year. There is no single September intake carrying the occupancy of the property for the following twelve months.

After more than three decades developing and managing HMOs, we put a lot of value on that.

HMO oversupply is becoming a very real investment risk elsewhere

There is another issue that HMO investors need to take seriously, and in our view it is becoming more important by the year.

Supply.

An HMO can look excellent on a spreadsheet and still become a poor investment if too many landlords are chasing the same tenant. We are seeing that risk become far more pronounced in some of the large northern HMO markets, particularly places such as Manchester, Newcastle, Liverpool, Leeds and Sheffield.

These cities have attracted HMO investment for years. In some neighbourhoods, that has resulted in very high concentrations of shared housing. Once that happens, the investment equation changes. You are no longer simply asking whether there is tenant demand. You are asking how many competing rooms are sitting within half a mile of your front door, what specification those rooms offer, whether landlords are cutting rents to fill them and what the local authority is likely to do about further HMO growth.

The planning response is already visible.

Manchester has an Article 4 Direction covering the city which removes the normal permitted development right to convert a C3 dwelling into a small C4 HMO. The council states that it would generally be unlikely to approve another HMO where there are already large numbers of shared houses nearby.

Leeds has Article 4 controls across a substantial number of neighbourhoods, with its planning policy expressly referring to avoiding the harmful effects of high concentrations of HMOs and protecting communities from becoming imbalanced.

Liverpool requires planning permission for small HMOs within its designated Article 4 areas, while Newcastle has several Article 4 Directions specifically controlling conversion from ordinary family housing into HMOs. Sheffield introduced its HMO Article 4 controls in areas where shared housing concentrations had reached 20% or more, with the council’s own evidence referring to the need to limit further proliferation of HMOs and prevent communities becoming dominated by shared housing.

That tells investors something.

Local authorities do not introduce these controls for entertainment. They tend to appear once HMO concentrations have become sufficiently significant that planners and residents are concerned about the balance of the local housing stock, parking, waste, noise, transient populations and the loss of ordinary family homes.

And once a street already contains a significant concentration of HMOs, neighbours can be understandably resistant to another one appearing next door.

That is a very different environment from buying into a market where there is still room for carefully selected, professionally managed shared accommodation.

Doncaster does have an HMO Article 4 Direction of its own, and investors need to understand that rather than pretend otherwise. It has been in force since October 2019 and covers defined central areas including Town, Town Fields, Wheatley, Hexthorpe, Balby, Wheatley Hills, Intake and Belle Vue.

For us, that makes property selection and planning knowledge even more important. It does not alter the wider point. Doncaster is not a market where we are trying to squeeze another generic student HMO into a street already saturated with virtually identical shared houses.

We select individual properties and micro-locations where the numbers, tenant demand, planning position and competing supply make sense.

That is a very, VERY, important distinction for an HMO investor.

Cheap property alone is not enough. A big university alone is not enough. A headline rental figure from a letting agent is certainly not enough. If fifty landlords are competing for the same forty tenants, somebody is going to have empty rooms.

We would rather operate in a city where professional HMO accommodation forms part of the housing solution for an expanding workforce than join a race to add yet another shared house to an already crowded student market.

Look at where major companies are putting their money

One of the easiest ways to understand Doncaster is to look at the companies that have already chosen it.

Amazon has not made a token investment in the area. It has established a major stronghold in and around Doncaster.

Amazon has operated multiple fulfilment centres in the area, including major facilities at iPort. One of those buildings extends to more than one million square feet, while further facilities have followed as the company’s presence in Doncaster has grown.

Lidl has made a similarly serious commitment. Its Doncaster regional distribution centre at iPort covers roughly 686,000 square feet and represented an investment of around £70 million when it opened, serving stores across a large part of northern and central England.

Then look at some of the other names that have chosen Doncaster and iPort: CEVA Logistics, Fellowes, Maritime Transport, Woodland Group, Euro Pool System and Dusk among them.

These are not companies choosing locations on instinct.

Amazon, Lidl and international logistics groups have enormous amounts of data available to them. They study labour availability, road access, population reach, delivery times, land costs, freight routes, utilities, workforce trends and long-term capacity before signing off investments of tens or hundreds of millions of pounds.

Their data rooms are considerably larger than ours.

When some of the biggest and most sophisticated businesses in the world repeatedly run the numbers and those numbers point towards Doncaster, we think that tells you quite a lot.

They have done the homework.

Doncaster’s UK connectivity explains a lot of those decisions

Put Doncaster on a map and the corporate interest starts making sense.

The city sits alongside the M18 with rapid access to the A1(M), M1, M62 and M180. Business Doncaster has previously stated that around 87% of the UK population can be reached within a four-hour drive, while figures published around iPort put the proportion even higher.

For logistics, warehousing and distribution businesses, that is a very strong geographical position. Goods can move north, south, east or west without the business having to fight its way out of a congested city centre first.

Then there is the railway.

Doncaster sits directly on the East Coast Main Line, one of the UK’s principal north-south rail routes, with direct services into London King’s Cross. The quickest journeys can be around an hour and a quarter, putting central London within genuinely practical travelling distance.

No kidding, it can be that fast that the drink you bought at Doncaster station is often still hot when you arrive in London.

That gives you some idea of the geography we are talking about. Doncaster is not an isolated northern market sitting several hours away from the country’s main commercial centres. You can get on a train in Doncaster and step off in the middle of London around 75 minutes later, while Leeds, Sheffield and York are all considerably closer.

For employers, consultants, contractors and professionals who need to move between regional operations and London, that is useful in a very practical sense. It also broadens the employment catchment well beyond the city itself.

Freight gets another advantage. iPort Rail has direct access to the national rail network and services linking Doncaster with major ports including Southampton, Felixstowe and Teesport.

Put road, passenger rail and freight rail together and it becomes much easier to understand why Amazon, Lidl and major international logistics businesses have committed so heavily to Doncaster.

Unity brings another major employment district

The Unity development around Junction 5 of the M18 adds another layer to the employment argument.

This is a large mixed-use development covering roughly 250 hectares, incorporating commercial space, employment uses, new housing and supporting infrastructure.

The development has been associated with plans for more than 2 million square feet of employment space and approximately 3,100 new homes, with forecasts of up to 7,000 new jobs as the wider project develops.

For an HMO investor, we are interested not only in the number but in the type of jobs likely to be created.

Unity’s location beside the motorway and its focus on industrial, commercial, logistics and employment development means many of those jobs sit naturally within the demographic we already accommodate in our properties.

This is not about pretending seven thousand people suddenly arrive in Doncaster tomorrow. Large developments take years to build out. As long-term property investors, that is exactly the point.

If you are buying a property with a five, ten or fifteen-year view, what is being constructed around you matters.

Doncaster Sheffield Airport could change the employment picture again

Then there is the airport.

Doncaster Sheffield Airport closed in November 2022. Since then, City of Doncaster Council and the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority have moved from campaigning for its return into an actual reopening programme, backed by major public funding and a strategic partnership with Munich Airport International.

The timetable has changed from some of the earlier headlines, so we prefer to deal with the current position rather than repeat old reopening dates. Passenger flights are now targeted around the winter 2027/28 season, with bookings expected to become available before operations restart.

The economic opportunity around the airport extends considerably further than passenger flights.

Plans for the wider airport and Gateway East area have been associated with thousands of jobs across aviation, cargo, engineering, maintenance, advanced manufacturing and associated businesses. The airport Full Business Case has previously estimated more than 5,000 gross direct jobs by 2050 and around £5 billion of cumulative GVA uplift over the period.

An airport creates employment before you even get to the passengers. Engineers, security staff, ground crews, maintenance teams, freight operators, administrators, catering staff, managers and supporting businesses all need people.

Put that alongside an established logistics cluster, Unity, iPort and Doncaster’s rail engineering base and the HMO demand argument becomes much wider than one development.

Employment growth is already happening

It is easy to get carried away with future job figures, so we think it is just as important to look at what has already happened.

City of Doncaster Council’s monitoring recorded a net increase of 5,643 full-time equivalent jobs between 2015 and 2023, equivalent to growth of 5.2%.

Transport, storage and postal employment rose sharply during that period, while construction also added jobs. More recent labour market estimates have put the number of Doncaster residents in employment at around 150,000, with the local employment rate moving into the mid-70% range.

That is the base on which Unity, the airport and further commercial investment are being added.

The city is not sitting still waiting for one future project to save it.

Capital appreciation has already started to move

We primarily develop HMOs for income, but ignoring the value of the underlying asset would make little sense.

Centre for Cities ranked Doncaster first among the UK cities it measured for house-price growth between 2024 and 2025. Its figures showed the average price moving from around £181,100 to £195,400, equivalent to 7.9% annual growth.

That does not mean we assume another 7.9% every year. We do not build property investment cases on that sort of assumption.

What interests us is the relationship between the purchase price and everything happening around it.

Doncaster continues to offer property at prices which can make an HMO conversion commercially workable, but investors are buying into a city where employment, infrastructure and institutional investment are all moving at the same time.

We can therefore concentrate on buying the right house, in the right micro-location, creating the right room configuration and producing strong rental income. If the underlying property appreciates over time as well, that is another part of the return rather than something required to make a weak deal look acceptable.

Thirty-four years teaches you to distinguish a story from a market

We have now spent over 34 years developing and managing HMO property for our investors and ourselves.

During that time we have seen investment locations come into fashion and disappear again. We have seen areas promoted almost entirely because the properties were cheap. We have watched investors buy in university markets without really asking what happens if student demand changes, and we have seen people chase capital appreciation after most of it has already happened.

Doncaster has been different.

It has stood the test of time for us because there is a real economy underneath the property market. People work here. Large employers operate here. Warehousing, logistics, engineering, rail, healthcare, construction and manufacturing all create demand that does not disappear when university students go home for the summer.

It is also a market where we can still be selective about HMO supply.

That matters. We do not want to develop property in a location simply because HMOs have historically been popular there. Popularity attracts competition, competition can become oversupply, and oversupply eventually finds its way into rents, occupancy and resale values.

Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle and Sheffield all show, in different ways, what can happen when local HMO concentrations become a planning and community issue. Article 4 controls are already part of the landscape across significant parts of those markets.

Doncaster has controls in defined areas too, and we account for them property by property. The difference for us is that our investment case is not built around piling into an already mature student HMO district and hoping another six rooms can be squeezed into the market.

We are developing for working people in a city where the employment story is still expanding.

Amazon already has a major stronghold in and around Doncaster. Lidl has committed tens of millions of pounds. International logistics businesses continue to expand. Unity is being developed. The airport reopening programme is progressing. Doncaster remains directly connected into the UK’s motorway network and one of its most important mainline rail routes.

These businesses make location decisions using information most individual property investors will never possess.

When some of the largest companies in the world independently study Britain and repeatedly come back to Doncaster as somewhere they want to employ people, store goods, move freight and invest capital, we take notice.

We think investors should too.

Why Foot Forward continues to invest in Doncaster HMOs

Our interest in Doncaster has never depended upon finding the cheapest houses possible.

We are looking for properties where the purchase price, refurbishment cost, professional room rents, tenant demand, competing HMO supply and long-term economic position work together.

That last part about supply gets overlooked far too often.

An investor can buy a beautiful HMO producing an attractive theoretical yield, but if ten more HMOs open nearby over the following two years the economics can change quickly. Empty rooms do not care what the spreadsheet said when you bought the property.

After more than 34 years developing and managing HMOs, we would much rather operate in a market where we can see employment demand increasing without seeing HMO supply running away from it.

Doncaster has repeatedly given us that balance, which is why after more than three decades in property we are still developing and managing HMOs here for ourselves and for investors.

And we are still not relying on students to keep them occupied.

We would much rather own professionally designed shared accommodation in a city attracting investment from Amazon, Lidl and international logistics companies, with Unity under development, an airport being brought back into operation and London around 75 minutes away by direct train, than buy the fiftieth version of the same student HMO in a neighbourhood where residents and planners are already questioning whether enough is enough.

For investors wanting to see the types of HMO opportunities we are currently developing, you can view our available properties here:

View our current HMOs for sale

Doncaster has already given us decades of evidence. What makes it particularly interesting now is how much is still being built around it, and how much room we believe there still is for the right HMO in the right street, serving the right tenant.