Astor Pulse // London Monthly
May 2026 Edition
The trailing 12-month read on planning approvals, residential sales, and Article 4 activity across the London boroughs we track.
Scope & coverage
Astor tracks 7 London boroughs end to end for planning, with more onboarding; residential sales draw on all 33 London boroughs. HMLR Price Paid has a ~2-month publication lag, so sales figures for the latest 1–2 months are inherently incomplete — we mark those months as preliminary on the sales chart. Every figure below is traced to source and labelled with its borough scope.
In this edition
- 11,856 applications received across 7 London boroughs in our tracking window.
- Brent led volume with 3,144 received applications; approval rate withheld pending classification improvement.
- 1,065 active Article 4 directions across London; 24 protect HMO conversion across 23 boroughs.
02 // Planning Activity
Applications across the 7 London boroughs we track end to end.
Top 5 boroughs by application volume (received in window)
| Brent | 3,144 |
| Lambeth | 2,291 |
| Croydon | 2,109 |
| City of London | 1,540 |
| Ealing | 1,084 |
Volume can be influenced by scrape completeness, not just real activity — a fast portal we automate beats a slow one we don't.
Top 5 approval rates (≥50 decided AND ≥50% of received classified)
| Approval-rate ranking withheld this edition. Classification coverage across the publishable boroughs is 20.4% — below the threshold required to publish a defensible rate. The figure returns in a future edition once detail-scrape coverage clears. |
Excluded from this ranking: 5 boroughs under the sample-size floor, 1 borough under the classification floor (too small a fraction of received applications classified to rank safely).
03 // Residential Sales
HMLR Price Paid — all 33 London boroughs.
HMLR confirmed-published through Apr 2026; later months on the chart are preliminary.
By property type
| Flat / maisonette | 26,813 · median £420,000 |
| Terraced | 16,655 · median £575,000 |
| Semi-detached | 9,481 · median £615,000 |
| Detached | 2,925 · median £860,000 |
Top 5 boroughs by sales volume
| Bromley | 3,781 |
| Wandsworth | 2,815 |
| Barnet | 2,709 |
| Bexley | 2,577 |
| Richmond upon Thames | 2,505 |
Astor read
Across all 33 London boroughs, 55,874 residential sales completed in the 12 months to end of April 2026 (HMLR's confirmed-published window). The median resale price was £517,000. Flats and maisonettes accounted for 48 per cent of volume (26,813 sales, median £420,000), whilst terraced houses represented 29.8 per cent (£575,000 median). Bromley, Wandsworth, and Barnet topped the sales leaderboard. The monthly trend from June 2025 through April 2026 shows a decline in both volume and price: June 2025 opened at £530,000 median, falling to £495,000 by April 2026. May 2026 data are incomplete pending HMLR publication.
04 // HMO & Article 4 Watch
The regulatory landscape for landlords.
Top boroughs by HMO-flagged decisions (T12M)
| Ealing | 16 |
| Lambeth | 8 |
| Camden | 2 |
| City of London | 2 |
| Lewisham | 2 |
Coverage note
Article 4 counts reflect what our sync from planning.data.gov.uk has recorded. A count of zero in a borough does not mean the borough has no Article 4 directions — only that none are in our records yet. Verify with the council before acting on absence.
Astor read
Article 4 directions protecting HMO conversion remain embedded across London: 1,065 active designations in total, of which 24 are HMO-specific, spanning 23 boroughs. No new HMO Article 4 directions entered force during the window. HMO-flagged applications totalled 31 in the tracked population, with 10 approved and 531 received across London. Ealing led signalling with 16 flagged applications, followed by Lambeth (8). For landlords, the static Article 4 map and modest approval rate on HMO cases suggest continued caution in conversion-heavy boroughs, particularly in the west.
05 // Outlook
What to watch next.
If the 7-borough planning footprint maintains its current application receipt rate, Brent and Lambeth are likely to continue as the highest-volume approval bottlenecks through Q2 2026. The spike in March receivals and concurrent jump in pending cases merit monitoring — if that cohort clears briskly, throughput improves; if it stalls, the pipeline could tighten further. Sales data through April are final; June 2026 completions will be the next material release. Property-type composition (flats 48 per cent, terraced 30 per cent) suggests ongoing sensitivity to flat-market pricing pressure, particularly if the median-price decline persists. HMO investors should expect no material relief from Article 4 enforcement this calendar year based on current designations.
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Methodology, denominators, and what we don't yet cover
- Window. Headline figures are trailing 12 months ending 31 May 2026 (the most recently completed calendar month). Year-on-year (YoY) deltas compare against the immediately preceding T12M window of the same length. The "last 90 days" callout is the same data restricted to that shorter window — included for currency, not as a primary figure. T12M is the headline because it smooths planning's strong seasonality (Christmas dip, summer surge) and gives borough-level samples large enough to rank with confidence.
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Headline metric — applications received.
Every planning headline is built on applications received in the window. The "received" date is the LPA's official submission date (
date_received) when the council portal exposes it, falling back to the LPA's validation date (validated_date) when only the list-page date was captured — typically 0–7 days after receipt and published by the same council on the same portal. Both are LPA-attributed dates, not our observation date. Decisions are a sub-breakdown — the closed portion of the pipeline. We lead with received because it's the broadest defensible measure a critic with the same portals open could verify. - Headline sanity-check gate. Before this edition was published, every headline figure was checked against the raw database via a deliberately different query path, against MHCLG Live Table P120 (the national authoritative per-LPA application volume figures), and against the prior edition's number. Any borough's count below 50% or above 200% of P120 expected, or any London-total swing exceeding ±40% month-over-month, blocks publish. The check failure email is treated as a P0 incident.
- Approval rate denominator. Approval rate = approved / (approved + refused). Withdrawn applications are excluded from the denominator because they're not council decisions — the applicant pulled them. Some councils encourage withdrawal to avoid recording a refusal; we surface the withdrawn count separately so the reader can see if the pattern is unusual.
- Borough leaderboard guardrails. A borough is only ranked on approval rate if it meets both floors: at least 50 decided in the window (sample size) AND at least 50% of its received applications classified (representativeness). The second floor is critical — a borough with 50 decided out of 1,200 received is a 4% sample, and ranking off that risks publishing a number a critic could disprove with the council portal open. Each ranked row shows both numbers; excluded boroughs are counted separately so we don't hide exclusions.
-
Borough coverage and publishable set.
Astor automates daily scrapes of 24 of London's
33 council planning portals. A borough enters the
published headline only when our T12M coverage reaches at least
50%
of MHCLG Live Table P120's expected receipts for that borough. This edition
covers 7 borough(s) at
that confidence level.
- Brent — 3144 received, 143.5% of P120 expected
- City of London — 1540 received, 285.9% of P120 expected
- Croydon — 2109 received, 121.4% of P120 expected
- Ealing — 1084 received, 52.1% of P120 expected
- Greenwich — 859 received, 57.2% of P120 expected
- Lambeth — 2291 received, 119.0% of P120 expected
- Lewisham — 829 received, 61.2% of P120 expected
- Barking and Dagenham — 0 received vs 770 expected (0.0%)
- Barnet — 636 received vs 2756 expected (23.1%)
- Bexley — 248 received vs 1395 expected (17.8%)
- Bromley — 0 received vs 2347 expected (0.0%)
- Camden — 0 received vs 2317 expected (0.0%)
- Enfield — 629 received vs 2005 expected (31.4%)
- Hackney — 0 received vs 1396 expected (0.0%)
- Hammersmith and Fulham — 305 received vs 1479 expected (20.6%)
- Haringey — 0 received vs 1442 expected (0.0%)
- Harrow — 0 received vs 1474 expected (0.0%)
- Havering — 0 received vs 1557 expected (0.0%)
- Hillingdon — 0 received vs 1807 expected (0.0%)
- Hounslow — 0 received vs 1425 expected (0.0%)
- Islington — 0 received vs 1565 expected (0.0%)
- Kensington and Chelsea — 0 received vs 2649 expected (0.0%)
- Kingston upon Thames — 537 received vs 1159 expected (46.3%)
- Merton — 0 received vs 1215 expected (0.0%)
- Newham — 149 received vs 1171 expected (12.7%)
- Redbridge — 0 received vs 1792 expected (0.0%)
- Richmond upon Thames — 0 received vs 1964 expected (0.0%)
- Southwark — 103 received vs 1730 expected (6.0%)
- Sutton — 444 received vs 957 expected (46.4%)
- Tower Hamlets — 203 received vs 1046 expected (19.4%)
- Waltham Forest — 0 received vs 1417 expected (0.0%)
- Wandsworth — 0 received vs 2368 expected (0.0%)
- Westminster — 681 received vs 4909 expected (13.9%)
- Barking and Dagenham — BeFirst portal blocks automated requests; under review
- Bromley — Bespoke council portal; integration in progress
- Hackney — Bespoke council portal; integration in progress
- Haringey — Salesforce-backed portal; bespoke integration needed
- Hounslow — NECS portal; bespoke integration needed
- Kensington and Chelsea — Bespoke council portal; integration in progress
- Merton — Regulatory Hub portal; bespoke integration needed
- Redbridge — Idox SwiftLG variant; integration in progress
- Waltham Forest — BeFirst portal blocks automated requests; under review
- Classification coverage. 20.4% of applications received in this window have been status-classified by our pipeline. The remainder are in detail-scrape backlog and counted as "unknown". When we cite approval rates, the denominator is the classified subset — so for boroughs with low classification, our ranking floor (above) keeps them out of leaderboards.
- Sales. HMLR Price Paid, PPD category A only (standard residential transactions; excludes auction sales, repossessions, and buy-to-let transfers). HMLR publishes with a ~2-month lag, so any month after Apr 2026 is preliminary in the snapshot. The median-resale headline excludes new builds because their pricing is developer-set, not market-clearing; the all-transactions median is computed too but is the volatile one.
- Article 4. "Designated in T12M" uses the legal start_date of each direction (not the date we first stored the row). Active count = directions whose end_date is null in our records. The Open Government Licence v3 feed at planning.data.gov.uk is the primary source; we hand-curate a small seed for borough-wide HMO directions known to be missing from the national feed. A zero count for a borough does not mean that borough has no Article 4 — verify with the council.
- HMO classification. Per-application HMO signal set by Astor's triage (Claude Haiku 4.5) reading the proposal text — see the Planning Checker for the per-application view. The HMO-flagged decisions count compounds three pipelines (list scrape × detail scrape × triage), so its absolute number is conservative; treat as a floor, not a measurement.
- AI commentary. Generated by Claude Haiku 4.5 with structured tool-use; every number it cites must appear on this page. Commentary is advisory and editorial, not regulated financial or planning advice. Astor is not FCA-authorised.
- Scope & sourcing. Planning figures cover the London boroughs we track end to end; residential sales cover all 33 London boroughs. Every figure is traced to a public source — HMLR Price Paid, council planning portals, and planning.data.gov.uk. A zero or an absence means we hold no record of it, not that none exists — verify with the relevant council before relying on any specific finding for a decision.
Past editions
Astor read
Across the 7 London boroughs we track end to end, councils received 11,856 applications in the 12 months to May 2026. Of 1,234 decided applications, the decision rate is withheld this edition; classification coverage stands at 20.4 per cent of the received population, below our publishable floor. Brent dominated the volume leaderboard with 3,144 received, followed by Lambeth (2,291) and Croydon (2,109). The monthly series shows seasonal dips in summer and winter months, with a notable spike in March 2026 (1,620 received). The pending queue stood at 1,190 applications at window end, suggesting sustained throughput pressure across the tracked boroughs.