Voice of the Agent 2025: Part 5

After three years of reports, thousands of survey responses, and a sold-out conference at Bletchley Park, we’ve reached the final chapter in this year’s Voice of the Agent programme. Part 5 has officially landed, and with it twelve months of research and insight, neatly wrapped up like the gifts under the Christmas tree.

A Year of TVOTA: The Story So Far

Before diving into the new edition, it’s worth reminding ourselves how much ground Voice of the Agent has covered this year. We’ve published four core reports, released a Prime Edition that explored the complex realities of the top end of the market, and brought industry professionals together in person and online at our Bletchley Park conference.

Across the programme, we’ve gathered over 3,000 survey responses, interrogated millions of datapoints, and tracked market sentiment week-by-week. Every piece of this programme has tried to answer a single question: what’s actually happening out there - and what does it mean for the people who make their living in property?

Part 5 picks up that thread and pulls everything together.

The Fiscal Backdrop: A Budget That Tightened the Screws

Part 5 opens with the political and fiscal backdrop - because whether we like it or not, the autumn’s Budget decisions will frame the next few years of agency life.

This year’s Budget introduced the new £2 million “mansion tax”, affecting fewer than 0.5% of transactions nationwide, alongside heavier taxation for landlords from 2027 and an ambitious promise to deliver 1.5 million homes - potentially the biggest decade of housebuilding since the 1970s.

Inside the industry, reaction is strikingly clear. 85% of real estate professionals believe middle-income households will feel the Budget the most (compared with 41% of the general public). Almost half of agents expect their own taxes to rise, and over 80% believe Labour has not kept its promise not to raise headline taxes once freezes and thresholds are factored in.

This is a sector that sees the Budget not as political theatre, but as a hard fiscal reset - one that will squeeze the very households who drive the majority of transactions.

The Market Outlook

From Westminster, the report moves into the economy and the housing market. The headline?

2026 looks neither catastrophic nor euphoric - more “stubbornly functional”.

Economic growth is expected to sit between 1.0% and 1.4%, inflation looks set to hover at around 2.5%, and Bank Rate is forecast to drift only gently down toward 3–3.5%. It’s better than panic territory, but nowhere near comfortable.

Yet despite all that, the housing market keeps moving. Most forecasters now expect 2–4% house price growth in 2026, with Yorkshire and the North East pushing closer to 3.5%, while London sits near 0%. Once you adjust for inflation, it’s essentially a market treading water.

Transactions settle around 1.15 million - slightly down on 2025, still below pre-pandemic norms, but far from frozen. First-time buyers remain the most active group, juggling better price-to-income ratios with mortgage costs that remain noticeably heavier than in the days of 2% money.

In short: it’s a functioning market, just one wearing heavier boots.

Confidence: A Divided Picture Inside Agency Businesses

One of the most fascinating themes in Part 5 is confidence - especially the contrast between public sentiment and what’s happening inside agency businesses.

Public belief in rising house prices has been remarkably resilient. Net confidence among all adults has climbed from around 5% in early 2024 to around 20% in mid-2025, with home movers even more upbeat, peaking in the mid-20s to low-30s. There has not been a single point in the series where pessimists outnumber optimists.

But inside agency businesses, the story splits sharply.

Sales teams are heading into 2026 with conviction: 60% of sales-focused agents are confident their instructions will rise, and only 6% say they’re unconfident.

Lettings teams tell a different story: just 31% feel confident, 25% are pessimistic, and 45% sit squarely on the fence.

For many lettings businesses, squeezed margins, nervous landlords and the looming Renters’ Rights Act are clouding the horizon.

But the most interesting divide isn’t between sales and lettings - it’s between the top performers and the rest.

Among the top quartile of agencies, 77% are confident about 2026, whereas among the top 5%, it’s 80% - and none report being unconfident.

Marketing Capability: The Ingredients Are There, But The Rhythm Isn’t

This year we’ve assessed more than 200 agencies using our ISTAR diagnostic, which measures Insight, Strategy, Talent, Action and Results. The industry’s overall marketing maturity score lands at 59% - solid, but far from optimised.

Beneath that average, Insight scores 66%, Talent scores 63%, Strategy and Results both sit at 55%, and Action lands at 56%

The raw ingredients - market understanding, motivation, capability - are there. What’s missing is rhythm. Consistency. The operational heartbeat that turns effort into compounding momentum.

What We Learned from Bletchley Park

The second half of Part 5 draws together the biggest lessons from the stage at Bletchley. To name a few:

Heather Staff delivered one of the most important messages of the day: estate agency is now a high-cost, low-margin business operating with consumer behaviour that has changed faster than most organisations have adapted. Employment costs have risen 13–15%, wage pressure has jumped 40%, and staff churn has reached a point where one in three agents is expected to leave their job this year. At the same time, over 60% of consumers now avoid phone calls, and nearly a quarter of 18–34-year-olds never answer the phone at all. In this environment, friction is fatal - manual forms lose more than 30% of users before completion. Her message was unambiguous: the businesses that thrive will be the ones that redesign their operating models around automation, digital workflows and the reality of modern consumer behaviour.

Will Ullstein took us into the world of the next-generation consumer. His message was simple but urgent: today’s buyers and sellers expect faster decisions, clearer ethical alignment, and digital-first experiences as standard. Convenience isn’t a differentiator anymore - it’s the baseline. The winners will be the agents who can reduce friction, collapse decision time, and communicate value in a world where attention is disappearing.

Kate Faulkner dismantled the industry’s favourite myths about the housing crisis. The market’s problems aren’t the result of mysterious supply shortages or dramatic demographic swings - they’re the product of decades of deliberate political choices. Her call to action was for agents to become translators of fact rather than amplifiers of folklore. When consumers are bombarded with noise, clarity becomes a competitive asset.

And Phill Agnew brought the psychology of persuasion to the surface, reminding us that decisions are almost never made logically. They’re shaped by context, contrast, effort, expectation, and emotion. In a market where every agent has access to the same portals, the same tools and the same data, the ability to influence how people think - not just what they think - becomes a major point of differentiation.

Across the day, a single message came through: the future of agency belongs to businesses that combine human judgement, behavioural insight and technological leverage in equal measure. The firms that thrive will be the ones that build systems around how people actually behave, not how the industry wishes they did.

Looking Ahead: A New Era for Voice of the Agent

Which brings us to the final reveal.

From 2026, Voice of the Agent evolves. Instead of quarterly reports, we’ll move to a rolling monthly insight model - reflecting the simple truth that the market now shifts month by month, not year by year.

Twelve themed monthly editions will give agents real-time clarity on the issues that shape performance: sales, lettings, regulation, AI, portals, marketing, consumer behaviour, and more.

Voice of the Agent becomes not a yearly snapshot, but a pulse.

Part 5 is the bridge between what the industry has been and what it’s becoming. If you want to understand how agents are reading the fiscal landscape, how confident the top performers really are, what the market is likely to feel like on the ground in 2026, and how Bletchley’s ideas connect to what happens next, this edition is essential reading.

You can download the full Voice of the Agent 2025: Part 5 report here.