Bristol rents fall for the first time in six years as new-build glut and student exodus bite

Rents in Bristol have fallen for the first time since 2020, according to figures released this week by a property data firm, in a sign that the city’s decade-long run as one of the most expensive rental markets outside London may be ending. Average asking rents across the city dropped 2.4% in the year to September to £1,612 a month, with one-bedroom flats in the centre and Harbourside down by 5.1%.

The fall is modest against the 38% rise that Bristol saw between 2020 and 2025, and rents remain far above the level of 2019. But letting agents say the direction has changed and that the reasons are structural rather than seasonal. Around 4,200 new flats have been completed in the city since the start of 2025, the largest wave of building in a generation, concentrated in Temple Quarter, Bedminster and the old Harbourside industrial sites, and most of them are now trying to find tenants at once.

“Two years ago we would put a one-bed in Southville on the market on a Monday and have 40 enquiries by Tuesday lunchtime,” said Alison Treece, lettings director at an independent agency in Bedminster. “Now the same flat gets six, and three of those are people trying to negotiate. Landlords who have not reduced are sitting empty for a month, and a month void costs more than a £75 reduction ever would.”

The second factor is students. Bristol’s two universities have cut intake of international postgraduate students by around a fifth since 2024, in line with a national decline, and a further 2,800 purpose-built student bedrooms have opened across the city in the same period. The combined effect has pulled thousands of students out of the shared houses in Clifton, Redland and Cotham that once set the price for the whole market. Agents report that a four-bedroom house in Redland that let for £3,200 a month in 2024 now goes for £2,850, and takes longer to shift.

For tenants the change is welcome but uneven. Priya Mehta, 29, a hospital pharmacist, moved from a one-bedroom flat in Easton to a larger one in Bedminster in August and is paying £40 a month less than she did before. “I had been told for years that the only way was up,” she said. “The agent actually asked what I was looking to pay. I had never heard that sentence before.” Family houses in the suburbs, by contrast, are still rising, with three-bedroom semis in Bishopston and Horfield up 3% on the year as the people who could not buy keep renting.

Landlords are responding by selling. The number of rental properties listed for sale in Bristol was 31% higher in September than a year earlier, according to the same data firm, with small landlords who bought during the boom citing falling yields, higher mortgage costs and the new tenancy rules that came into force this year. Treece says the sell-off, if it continues, will eventually tighten supply again. “The market is finding a level,” she said. “It is not collapsing. It is just that for the first time in a long time the tenant is holding some of the cards.”

Bristol city council, which has argued for years that the city needed to build its way out of a housing emergency, said the figures showed the policy working. Nationally, rents are still rising at 2.1% a year, with the fastest growth now in the north-east and in the smaller cities of the Midlands, and the slowest in London, Bristol and Edinburgh. The boom, it appears, is moving house.