What is Ground 1A and when can a landlord use it to evict a tenant to sell?

Ground 1A is a mandatory ground for possession introduced under the Renters' Rights Act 2025, in force since 1 May 2026. It lets a landlord evict a tenant specifically because they intend to sell the property. You have to give the tenant four months' notice, and you can't serve that notice at all within the first 12 months of a tenancy. Once the tenant leaves, you're expected to actually put the property on the market, generally within about three months, or you risk the notice being treated as bad faith. It's a formal legal commitment, not a soft decision you can quietly change your mind about later. If you're not confident you'll complete a sale within a realistic window, and especially if you're selling a flat, where Hamptons found 60% of landlord listings failed to sell in 2025, think carefully before serving notice at all. A sitting-tenant sale to another investor is often the safer route.

What happens if I evict my tenant to sell and the sale falls through?

Since 1 May 2026, if you've served a Ground 1A notice and recovered possession to sell but the sale doesn't complete, you're barred from granting a new tenancy or letting the property again for 12 months from the date the notice expired. You can't market it as a rental either. That means paying the mortgage, insurance and any maintenance with zero rental income for a full year, on top of whatever it costs you to keep trying to sell. On a fairly typical buy-to-let at current average mortgage rates, that can mean a basic-rate landlord is roughly £11,200 worse off over the year than if they'd simply carried on letting the property. Breaching the ban by re-letting early risks a substantial civil penalty and potential legal action from the tenant you displaced. Only go down this route if you're genuinely confident the sale will complete, ideally with a cash buyer or firm offer already in hand.

Can I re-let my property while I'm still trying to sell it?

Not if you've evicted a tenant under Ground 1A to sell and the notice has already expired: you're legally barred from re-letting or even advertising the property as a rental for 12 months from that point, regardless of how the sale is going. This is a deliberate change under the Renters' Rights Act, designed to stop landlords using a false intention to sell as a way to remove a tenant. If your sale is taking longer than expected and you haven't yet served notice or recovered possession, you still have the option to sell with the tenant in place, which keeps rental income coming in throughout the process and avoids the ban altogether. Once notice has expired and the tenant has gone, though, there's no fallback: the property either sells, or it sits empty and unlet until the 12 months are up. That's the calculation worth doing honestly before you start.

Is it better to sell a buy-to-let with a tenant still living in it?

For most landlords weighing up an exit right now, yes. Selling with a sitting tenant avoids the Ground 1A notice period, the eviction itself, and the 12-month re-letting ban entirely, because you never lose possession or rental income while marketing the property. The trade-off is a smaller buyer pool: owner-occupiers generally won't buy a home with a tenant in it, so you're largely selling to other landlords or investors, which can mean a lower offer than an equivalent vacant property would fetch. Given that over half of landlord-listed homes failed to sell in 2025 (Hamptons), and that a failed vacant sale after eviction can now cost upwards of £11,000 in lost income and ongoing mortgage interest, a slightly lower sale price with a tenant in situ is often the better bet mathematically. If cash flow rather than an urgent need for capital is your real problem, refinancing to a current best-buy buy-to-let rate is worth costing out before you sell at all.

Selling up? The 12-month rule that could cost £11,200

You've watched two landlords you know sell up this year, and the headlines keep telling you everyone else is doing the same. One of your rental properties has been on your mind for months: the yield's thin, Section 24 already eats most of the profit, and cashing out to put the money somewhere else feels like the sensible move. What the exodus headlines don't tell you is what happens if you serve notice, get your tenant out, and then the sale doesn't happen.

Here's the number that should stop you before you serve notice: over half the homes landlords listed for sale in 2025 didn't sell, rising to six in ten for flats (Hamptons, 2026). Since 1 May 2026, a failed sale after evicting a tenant under the Renters' Rights Act comes with a mandatory 12-month ban on putting the property back on the rental market. On a fairly typical buy-to-let, that gap can leave a basic-rate landlord around £11,200 worse off than if they'd simply carried on letting it.

The exodus is real, but it hides a failure rate nobody mentions

Landlords are leaving the private rented sector at 562 properties a day so far this quarter, up from 495 at the same point last year and just 167 at the start of the decade (TwentyCi, September 2026). It's the fastest pace of departures in at least ten years, and it's easy to read that as a signal that selling up is the obvious, low-risk move right now.

The picture is messier than the headline number suggests. Hamptons data for June 2026 found landlord purchases had actually overtaken landlord sales for the first time since 2019, as previously-rented homes coming onto the sales market slowed. Some landlords are leaving in droves; others, mostly those with stronger local yields, are buying more. What both groups share is the same underlying fact: half the landlords who do try to sell don't manage it within the year. Analysis of homes listed by landlords in 2025 shows 51% failed to sell, and that figure jumps to 60% for flats (Hamptons, 2026).

The exodus isn't evenly spread either. Hamptons found the sharpest fall in landlord sales was in Northern markets, where stronger yields give landlords more reason to hold on to stock, while in London around one in five homes listed for sale in June 2026 had previously been let within the last five years (Hamptons, 2026). If your property sits in a region where landlords are holding rather than selling, that's usually because the numbers still work there, and it's worth asking why you'd be the exception.

So if you're weighing up whether to list your own property, the headline you should be reading isn't how many landlords are leaving. It's that roughly half of those who try don't succeed within twelve months, and what that means once you've already evicted your tenant to do it.

What Ground 1A actually commits you to

Ground 1A is the mandatory possession ground under the Renters' Rights Act 2025 that lets a landlord evict a tenant specifically to sell, in force since 1 May 2026. It requires four months' notice, and you can't serve it at all within the first 12 months of a tenancy. Once your tenant has left, you're expected to genuinely market the property for sale, generally within around three months, or the notice risks being treated as having been served in bad faith.

That's before you've even had a viewing. Registering the property correctly under the landlord database rules matters here too: an unregistered landlord already loses the right to most Section 8 possession routes, and Ground 1A is no exception to that pressure to stay compliant.

So what this means for you: this is a formal legal commitment with a built-in runway of at least four months before you get the keys back, not a soft decision you can quietly reverse once it's underway.

If it doesn't sell, you can't just let it again

This is the part most landlords haven't costed out. Once your Ground 1A notice has expired and you've recovered possession, you're legally barred from granting a new tenancy, permitting anyone to occupy the property, or even advertising it as a rental, for a full 12 months from that expiry date, whether or not the sale has gone through. Breaching the ban risks a substantial civil penalty, reportedly starting around £25,000 per property, plus potential legal action from the tenant you displaced.

Analysts estimate that had this ban been in force through 2025, somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 previously-rented homes that failed to sell would have been legally locked out of the rental market for a year, sitting empty rather than earning anyone a return. That's not a small edge case: it's the realistic outcome for roughly half of all landlord-listed sales.

There's a smaller silver lining buried in this. A property that's empty and off the rental market isn't an actively let property, so it falls outside the scope of the PRS Database registration requirement while it sits vacant. That saves you the £65 annual fee for as long as you're not letting it, but it's a trivial offset against the far larger cost of the lost rent and the mortgage interest still going out every month. If the 12 months pass and you decide to let the property again rather than keep trying to sell, you'll need to register it under whichever regional deadline applies to your area at that point.

So if your plan was always "sell it, and if that drags on, just put a tenant back in to cover the mortgage in the meantime", that fallback no longer exists. The property either sells, or it earns you nothing for a year.

The numbers: what a stalled sale actually costs

Take a fairly typical UK buy-to-let bought at the national median price of £273,000 (HM Land Registry / ONS UK House Price Index, July 2026), let at the average UK monthly rent of £1,400 (ONS Price Index of Private Rents, 12 months to August 2026), with a 75% loan-to-value interest-only mortgage of £204,750 at the current average buy-to-let rate of 5.32% (Moneyfacts, early September 2026).

Gross yield on that property is 6.2%. After a 12% management fee, a 10% maintenance reserve, an insurance estimate and a one-month void allowance, net yield comes to around 4.1%, or £11,284 a year before mortgage costs. Annual mortgage interest is roughly £10,893, leaving a pre-tax surplus of about £391 a year. After Section 24, where mortgage interest gets only a 20% tax credit rather than full deduction, a basic-rate taxpayer nets about £313 a year (£26 a month); a higher-rate taxpayer is already about £1,944 a year underwater (£162 a month) on the same property, before any of this comes into play.

Now compare that to the failed-sale scenario. Twelve months of the re-letting ban means £10,893 of mortgage interest going out with zero rent coming in to offset it, since there's no tenant. There's no Section 24 tax bill either, because there's no income to tax, but that's cold comfort against a year of pure cash outflow. For a basic-rate landlord, that's a swing from +£313 a year to -£10,893, a difference of roughly £11,200. For a higher-rate landlord already £1,944 a year underwater, the same forced vacancy adds another £8,950 to the loss. So before you serve any notice, run this exact calculation on your own mortgage balance and rent, because that swing is the real price of getting the sale wrong, not just the estate agent's fee.

The maths, in one place:

£273,000 property, 75% LTV, £1,400/month rent, 5.32% average buy-to-let rate.
Letting normally: basic-rate landlord +£313/year; higher-rate landlord -£1,944/year.
Failed sale, 12-month re-letting ban: -£10,893/year for both, regardless of tax band.
The swing: roughly £11,200 worse off for a basic-rate landlord, and £8,950 worse off for a higher-rate landlord who was already in the red.

What this means for you

The maths points toward two better routes than an eviction-to-sell gamble for most landlords in your position right now. If your real goal is getting capital out to redeploy elsewhere, selling with the tenant still in place to another landlord or investor buyer avoids Ground 1A, the eviction, and the ban entirely, even though it narrows your buyer pool and may mean a slightly lower offer than a vacant sale. Given the current failure rate, a smaller guaranteed sum often beats a larger one you have a coin-flip chance of never receiving. If you're weighing that against restructuring how you hold the property rather than selling it outright, it's worth reading how the costs of incorporating a portfolio stack up first.

If cash flow, not an urgent need for a lump sum, is the actual problem, refinancing is worth serious consideration before you go anywhere near a notice. Paragon Bank's new best-buy two-year fix at 3.40% for EPC A-C rated properties at 75% LTV would cut the mortgage interest on the same £204,750 loan to roughly £6,962 a year, turning a higher-rate landlord's -£162 a month into something closer to +£100 a month on the identical property, without touching your tenant's tenancy at all. It's worth working through how that compares with a straightforward product transfer versus a full remortgage before you commit either way.

Most landlords who run these numbers properly end up concluding that Ground 1A only makes sense with a confirmed buyer, ideally cash, already in hand, and a price that reflects what the local market will actually pay rather than what you'd like the property to be worth. Understanding exactly how Section 24 tax relief is squeezing your existing cash flow will tell you fast whether refinancing alone solves your problem before you touch the tenancy at all.