BTR Amenities: Balancing Cost and Value

How much amenity space should BTR offer? How do we balance cost with rental premiums and resident satisfaction? HomeViews and Molior have collaborated on this unique analysis of BTR amenity space data to find answers.

In partnership with

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In partnership with

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Molior has now expanded its data platform beyond London to cover major UK cities. To help celebrate this, HomeViews and Molior conducted a unique analysis of amenity space and reviews data for Birmingham Built to Rent communities.

This generated some interesting initial insights into questions such as:

How does increasing amenity space impact resident ratings?
Does greater amenity space generate higher rental premiums?
Where is the most profitable balance between cost and resident satisfaction / higher premiums?

We have seen an amenities ‘arms race’ in UK BTR, but the industry is now raising questions around value/resident satisfaction and cost effectiveness. As a result, amenity light BTR is an increasingly common discussion topic.

This study is an initial exploration that has raised some interesting findings around the value of amenity space to residents, and its connection to pricing.

Our thanks to Debra Yudolph at SAY and Nick Jopling at Square House Consultancy for adding their thoughts as our expert industry commentators.

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We believe the best information about a residential development comes from the people living there. Owners and tenants have a lot of useful information to share with their prospective neighbours, not just on the property itself and its locality, but also on the development and building management.

Does it matter how recent reviews are?

We often encourage Partners to regularly collect reviews. This keeps them in the running for our annual Resident Choice Awards, but it’s also something that consumers value.

Research by Power Reviews found that 64% of consumers said they were more likely to buy a product with fewer, more recent reviews than if it had a higher volume of reviews published three or more months ago.

44% of consumers in that same study wanted to ideally be able to find reviews written within the past month. And 62% would not purchase a product if the only reviews available were published a year or more ago.

How many reviews do you need?

Brightlocal data is again the best place to turn to understand the broad spread of opinions shown by consumers. In 2025, 14% of consumers wanted to see 100+ reviews in order to trust a company’s average star rating. However, the majority of consumers said that 20-49 reviews was enough for them to trust an average rating (33%), while 22% said that 50-99 reviews were enough.

How much should you engage with reviews?

Consumers are more consistent on how much they want to see companies responding to reviews. 89% were likely to use a business that repsonded to all reviews, whether positive or negative. Far fewer (55%) were likely to use a business that only responded to negative reviews.

As we stated above, responding to positive and negative reviews clearly demonstrates to prospective residents that you care.