From Research to Resident: Guiding the BTR Consumer Journey

How are consumers searching for, and finding, their Build to Rent homes? What does this tell us about how we can best explain and market the BTR product? This joint HomeViews / Rightmove study includes findings from a brand new survey of UK BTR residents, as well as insights from Rightmove’s unmatched insights into property search journeys.

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From Reseach to Resident: Guiding the BTR Consumer Journey

In partnership with

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The Build to Rent sector is now firmly established in the UK but is still an unfamiliar housing format for many UK consumers, representing only 1.9% of PRS stock. As a result, many questions remain about how best to define, explain and market BTR. We wanted to explore how residents were talking about BTR and compare this with messaging being used by operators.

Resident demographics are now better understood, but we also wanted to know how BTR residents found their homes. How long did they stay? Where did they move, and why?

We were able to answer such questions by surveying our database of BTR reviewers and combining the results with Rightmove’s unmatched insights into users’ property search journeys.

Our thanks to our sponsors for supporting this study, as well as our good friends at the ARL for allowing us to present this data for the first time at the Annual BTR Conference.

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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.