Breaking Property News 16/7/26
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The Housing Market Does Not Need Saving: It Needs De-Risking
Thought leadership by Olivier Jauniaux, Founder of NestLink
“Everything starts with a good home,” Andy Burnham told a hall full of highly hopeful supporters at the People’s History Museum in Manchester in June 2026, in the kind of speech usually delivered by men who expect to be running the country shortly thereafter. Nominations to replace Keir Starmer opened on 9 July and closed a week later. Whatever you make of “Manchesterism,” the housing instinct is well timed, because the market he wants to “fix” is not actually short of people who want to move, they are just more cautious.
The numbers make that clear enough. Mortgage approvals fell from 66,000 in April 2026 to 56,200 in May 2026, the lowest reading since December 2023. Nationwide’s index still found annual growth ticking up to 2.2% in June, but prices did not move month on month. Rightmove logged its steepest June asking-price fall in fourteen years. Put plainly, this is not a market where nobody wants to move house. It is a market where the people who might move are not confident enough to commit, which is a different and more interesting problem, and one that a stamp duty tweak will not solve.
Put simply: Demand or desire is never the issue, confidence is. Over the last decade, successive governments have had one instinct when faced with that problem: it is to stand at the side of the pitch like an over-tired football coach and shout generic encouragement. It’s hard to truly blame them. We’ve changed politicians more regularly than some people shower. With a short mandate anyway and a political approach to public engagement akin to the stardom quality of a B-Tier TikTok influencer, long term thinking and a genuinely bold strategy doesn’t seem to appear on the agenda… and I’m not sure the public would even be able to really engage anymore with anything other than automatic dis-like.
So they answer with mortgage guarantee here, a deposit top-up there, perhaps a stamp duty concession if the polling gets bad enough. None of these address what a reluctant property buyer is actually reluctant about, because the risk was not created with these details. It accumulated for years beforehand, in housing insecurity, in political end-of-the-world-ism, in thin savings, in a transaction system that still runs on hope and PDFs.
What America, and Barclays, actually found Which brings us, with almost suspicious neatness, to America. One thing Trumpian politics can not be accused of is subtlety. On 4 July, marking Independence Day, the US Treasury began seeding “Trump Accounts,” tax-advantaged investment accounts giving every American child born between 2025 and 2028 an initial $1,000 government contribution, with parents, employers and philanthropists free to top it. This money would have to be invested in low risk US based funds with capped fees.
Financial independence on Independence Day; you can see what he did there… The politics are probably not exportable, or at least I hope not. Unless a certain Trumpian wannabe gains power in Westminster, the UK remains politically distinct. Either way, the mechanism of these “Trump Accounts” is more interesting than the branding: an asset created before the child has an income, a mortgage application, or an opinion on interest rates.
Barclays has already done the maths on a British equivalent, and the bank’s own research borrows the older, gentler term for it: “baby bonds”. A UK scheme offering only the government’s seed contribution would add a genuinely underwhelming 0.02% to the value of the FTSE All-Share over eighteen years. If parents and employers were drawn into contributing around half the annual limit alongside it, that figure rises to 0.45%, more than twenty times the effect, without a penny more from the Treasury. The seed money, in other words, was never the point.
The point is whether it gets anyone into the habit of holding an asset at all. Britain has already run this experiment once and quietly failed it. Child Trust Funds, opened for every child born between September 2002 and January 2011 with a minimum £250 government deposit, now sit unclaimed in roughly 758,000 matured accounts, worth an estimated £2,242 each on average. That is not a design flaw in the concept, and although the now adult Gen-Z beneficiaries have a very different attitude to personal savings, no one sniffs at 2 grand. A slightly pre-funded Junior ISA sounds like an amazing idea, and as a young dad myself, I welcome anything that helps secure my baby’s future.
However, the CTF experiment is proof that creating an asset and creating an owner who knows it exists are two entirely different achievements, a distinction the property industry might recognise, because it has been quietly making the same mistake for years with EPCs, title data and search results nobody can find when they actually need them. Line up childhood housing security, early-life capital, pre-purchase decision quality and post-offer transaction risk, and you get something closer to a ladder than a market.
Burnham’s council housing programme sits at the bottom rung. A better-designed child savings scheme, one that actually learns from the Child Trust Fund’s mistakes rather than repeating them, would sit on the next. What sits above that is where this industry operates, and it is worth being honest about how little of it currently reduces risk rather than simply processing it once the risk has already been taken.
Where PropTech actually sits
This is also, not coincidentally, the argument NestLink has been building its case around. Its consumer-facing intelligence layer, KnowYourNest, treats a property as a decision to be understood rather than a listing to be admired, while the broader NestLink thesis will hold that information, professionals and the transaction itself ought to sit inside one connected journey rather than three unconnected ones. None of it is fully built yet. The coordination layer is still some months from full release, which is a more honest position than most of the sector currently offers, given how much of this year’s “AI-powered PropTech” has amounted to a chatbot bolted onto a search filter. OpenMoove and ADoor among others are chasing pieces of the same problem, which at least confirms the problem is real rather than invented for a pitch deck.
None of this fixes the supply shortage, low wages, or the price of a two-year fix. A platform cannot build a council house. But a system that reduces avoidable risk at every stage, from childhood to completion, stops those structural problems compounding into the kind of failure that turns up eighteen months later as a fall-through nobody wanted to own. Burnham wants to start at the home. The more useful question for anyone in this industry is why we keep insisting on starting there too.
The three-speed trap
Almost every government of the last several decades has reached for the same lever whenever first-time buyers get nervous: a stamp duty concession, a deposit scheme, a mortgage guarantee, Help to Buy under one administration, something with a different name under the next. These land immediately, in a real bank account, in time to matter to a Gen Z or Gen Alpha buyer trying to complete this year. Fast, visible, flashy policy, but expensive and gone by the next Budget. The market is strongly stimulated for a short while, driving up prices and making the next cohort of buyers less able to enter the market – the “boomerang generation”, kids who leave home to study, only to return as the prospect of living away from home is unaffordable, keeps getting bigger.
The second big alternative setting is slow and genuinely structural: a baby bond, a council housing programme, anything actually aimed at the accumulated risk rather than its price tag. However, by the time funding kicks in for these changes, if funding ever kicks in, the government, or it’s leader changes; the agenda changes and budget is restructured and expensive long-term policies are reduced or scrapped in favour of the next shiny toy. For those that survive, the trouble is the maturation date. These policies benefit an electorate that is literally barely conscious, let alone aware of politics.
There is a third setting, and it is usually the most punishing one. It moves fast and looks decisive but with all the political risk of a roulette wheel in an underground Casino. It’s a desperate political act that the last decade of politics has been particularly hard on since the turmoil of Brexit. “Landlords are evil”: appears to be a growing cross-party manifesto policy. Awkward considering an estimated 20% of MPs declare some sort of landlord or property adjacent secondary income. Tax changes, added professional regulation, more pressure on the rental market dressed up as “reform”, only seem to be confusing the market and reducing overall public appetite and confidence in property.
If the latest Renter’s Right Act was intentionally designed to reduce property prices, that would at least be a coherent, although somewhat brutal strategy. Given the vested interests sitting inside Parliament, that explanation seems unlikely. These sorts of policies change things so quickly that the affected industries can barely react in time. Other similar policies passed quietly, with barely any of the electorate aware of what just happened, the DMCC 2024 Act among those with effects that may compound for decades to come, for better or for worse… right up until a policy proves disastrous enough to be quietly withdrawn.
Making offer’s legally binding earlier in the process is very likely a good idea, and brings the home-buying process up to speed with much of the rest of the world. In the short term it will also dramatically decrease sales, which rather undercuts the Treasury’s other home of squeezing Capital Gains Tax and Stamp Duty out from the market.
At the end of the day none of these policies really de-risk the home buying experience for buyers and sellers increasingly anxious about every penny they spend. The Fast lever moves the price, usually upwards. The slow lever gets eaten by inflation and rising material costs before it reaches a buyer who is currently still in nappies. The reactive lever sits in between, but is constantly pulled under political fear, and decisions made from a position of weakness are usually poor ones.
In my opinion, the solution does exist. In an age of AI and genuine digital connectivity, better, more accessible information and calmer coordination at the point of decision and the point of sale, is the only lever that can be both: fast enough to matter within a single house move, and structural enough to actually reduce what a buyer does not know.
Upfront material information packs are a real step in the right direction but they can’t solve the problems alone. It all starts with getting the UK councils properly online and digital. It then needs someone to explain that data to the nervous buyer, in a way which keeps their attention and points them towards the right decision, rather than just another dashboard.
Andrew Stanton Executive Editor – moving property and proptech forward. PropTech-X
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