Roundup: £9.9bn EPC bill, and 9% less to borrow

If you have spent this week half-watching Rightmove and half-dreading whatever your mortgage broker or letting agent is about to tell you, you're not imagining that the ground keeps shifting under you. Five things happened in UK housing this week that actually change your numbers, not just the headlines, and none of them got the attention they deserved on their own.

The one worth reading first: if your mortgage-in-principle is more than a few months old, it's probably wrong. Here is why, and four more stories with the "so what" attached.

Borrowing power has quietly dropped 9% since January

Average five-year fixed mortgage rates have climbed from below 4% in January to around 4.8% today (Zoopla House Price Index, August 2026). That's not a dramatic-sounding move on its own, but Zoopla's own calculation shows it cuts what a buyer can borrow for the same monthly repayment by roughly 9%. A buyer who qualified for a £200,000 mortgage in January can now stretch to about £182,000 at the identical monthly cost.

Buyer demand has not collapsed in response. Zoopla notes searches are actually up 7% year-on-year over the past four weeks, which suggests plenty of people are still house-hunting on numbers that no longer hold. If your mortgage-in-principle dates from earlier this year, that's not a formality to skip, it's the single most likely reason an offer gets rejected on affordability grounds this autumn.

RICS says the mood is turning, even if the numbers are not yet

The headline figures from RICS's July UK Residential Market Survey (published 14 August 2026) look flat: new buyer enquiries sat at -28% and agreed sales at -30%, both unchanged from June. But two details underneath are more useful. New vendor instructions stabilised at -4%, a sharp improvement on June's -23%, and twelve-month sales expectations turned positive at +3%, the most optimistic reading since February.

A survey balance is sentiment, not a transaction count, and it has been wrong before. Still, if you're weighing whether to list your home this autumn or wait until spring, surveyors are telling you the wait may be shorter than the current negative-sounding headline numbers imply.

£9.58bn just landed for 70,000 new homes

On 25 August 2026 the government confirmed the first wave of funding from its £39 billion Social and Affordable Homes Programme (2026 to 2036): almost £10 billion, specifically £9.58bn, allocated to 33 councils and housing associations newly given long-term Strategic Partner status with Homes England (MHCLG, 25 August 2026). It funds more than 70,000 homes, nearly two-thirds of them for Social Rent, with over £16 billion still to be allocated outside London and roughly £5 billion within it.

This is committed spending, not a press release about future intentions, which is a genuine change from most housing announcements. If you're on a council waiting list, it's worth checking whether your local authority is one of the 33 named partners. It's not, however, a reason to pause a rent-or-buy decision you need to make this year, because delivery on programmes this size runs in years, not months.

The EPC C bill has a real number attached now: £9.9bn

New government data shows 40.2% of privately rented homes assessed in England and Wales in the year to June 2026 are still below EPC band C, with the total cost of getting the sector to band C estimated at £9.9 billion and an average of £5,387 per property, capped at £10,000 (MHCLG EPC statistical release, August 2026). The East Midlands is the worst-performing region at 45.5% below band C, with the South West, West Midlands and Yorkshire all close behind at around 44%.

The compliance deadline is still 1 October 2030, so nobody needs to act tomorrow. But £5,387 spread across four Octobers is a manageable line item on a rental spreadsheet, and £5,387 crammed into the final year before the deadline, alongside every other landlord in the same region trying to book the same tradespeople, isn't. If your rental stock sits in one of those higher-risk regions, this is the week to get an EPC assessment booked rather than filed under "eventually."

Landlords are split down the middle on their own future

Two surveys published within days of each other tell opposite stories. Benham and Reeves' landlord survey (26 August 2026) found 50.6% of landlords still believe residential property is a good long-term investment despite the extra regulation. Meanwhile the English Private Landlord Survey shows 31% plan to reduce their portfolio size and 16% are considering selling everything within two years.

Both can be true at once, because they are describing different landlords, or the same landlord at different time horizons. If you're weighing whether to sell a rental property, what half the sector says in a survey isn't your answer. Your own numbers are: run the Section 24 cash flow at your actual mortgage rate, and price in the EPC bill above, before you decide anything based on how confident your neighbour sounds.

What this means for you

If you take one thing from this week, make it the borrowing-power number, not the price forecasts. Price forecasts disagree by design, but a mortgage-in-principle that's three, six or nine months old is a fact you can check today, and for most buyers it's now overstating what a lender will actually offer. Before you view anything near the top of an old budget, get it re-run. If you're a landlord instead, the maths that should decide whether you sell is your own EPC bill and Section 24 position, worked out properly, the way we do in our Section 24 cash flow breakdowns, not the mood of a survey. And if you're eyeing a first purchase, remember the current Stamp Duty thresholds and the realistic size of a 5% deposit mortgage before you assume this week's borrowing-power squeeze has priced you out entirely. Most people who check both numbers this week find the picture is worse than January but not as bad as the headlines suggest, which at least means you're deciding on facts rather than mood.