Astor Pulse // London Monthly
April 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 5 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
- Received 9,621 planning applications across 5 London boroughs in our pipeline.
- HMO applications flagged at 31 across the planning window; 10 approved.
- Median resale price flat at £520,000 on 54,739 sales across all 33 boroughs.
02 // Planning Activity
Applications across the 5 London boroughs we track end to end.
Top 5 boroughs by application volume (received in window)
| Brent | 2,978 |
| Lambeth | 2,384 |
| Croydon | 2,015 |
| City of London | 1,564 |
| Lewisham | 680 |
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 20.5% — 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: 4 boroughs under the sample-size floor.
03 // Residential Sales
HMLR Price Paid — all 33 London boroughs.
HMLR confirmed-published through Mar 2026; later months on the chart are preliminary.
By property type
| Flat / maisonette | 26,195 · median £420,000 |
| Terraced | 16,359 · median £580,000 |
| Semi-detached | 9,301 · median £620,000 |
| Detached | 2,884 · median £865,000 |
Top 5 boroughs by sales volume
| Bromley | 3,672 |
| Wandsworth | 2,796 |
| Barnet | 2,699 |
| Bexley | 2,485 |
| Richmond upon Thames | 2,484 |
Astor read
Across all 33 London boroughs, 54,739 residential transactions closed in the trailing 12 months, with a median resale price of £520,000. Flats and maisonettes accounted for 47.9% of volume (26,195 units) at a £420,000 median; terraced houses represented 29.9% (16,359 units) at £580,000. Bromley, Wandsworth, and Barnet led by transaction count. The monthly series from May 2025 through March 2026 (HMLR's confirmed-published window) shows resale medians ranging from £490,000 to £548,000, with recent months stabilising around £500,000–£505,000. The April 2026 snapshot in our dataset is preliminary and reflects HMLR's publication lag; volumes in February and March dipped, consistent with seasonal and administrative timing rather than market weakness.
04 // HMO & Article 4 Watch
The regulatory landscape for landlords.
Top boroughs by HMO-flagged decisions (T12M)
| Ealing | 17 |
| 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
HMO applications flagged at 31 in the trailing 12 months across all boroughs, with 10 approved and 430 applications received carrying HMO characteristics. Ealing led the signal count at 17, followed by Lambeth at 8. Article 4 HMO directions remain active in 23 boroughs, with 24 HMO-specific designations in force across the portfolio. No new HMO Article 4 directions were legally designated during the window. Landlords should note that our HMO signal methodology flags planning applications meeting certain criteria; the approved count reflects only those cases we have traced to formal decision. Boroughs with known HMO Article 4 designations—including Ealing, Camden, Hackney, Islington, and Tower Hamlets—may carry designations not yet captured in our feed. Councils' own planning portals remain the authoritative source for current local policy.
05 // Outlook
What to watch next.
AI commentary unavailable for this edition — see the data tables above for the underlying signals.
Get this as a PDF — and the next edition automatically
Email me Astor Pulse.
We'll send the April 2026 PDF straight to your inbox, and the next edition on the 1st of next month. Free, one email per month, unsubscribe anytime.
Methodology, denominators, and what we don't yet cover
- Window. Headline figures are trailing 12 months ending 30 Apr 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.
-
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 5 borough(s) at
that confidence level.
- Brent — 2978 received, 135.9% of P120 expected
- City of London — 1564 received, 290.4% of P120 expected
- Croydon — 2015 received, 116.0% of P120 expected
- Lambeth — 2384 received, 123.8% of P120 expected
- Lewisham — 680 received, 50.2% of P120 expected
- Barking and Dagenham — 0 received vs 770 expected (0.0%)
- Barnet — 385 received vs 2756 expected (14.0%)
- Bexley — 85 received vs 1395 expected (6.1%)
- Bromley — 0 received vs 2347 expected (0.0%)
- Camden — 0 received vs 2317 expected (0.0%)
- Ealing — 776 received vs 2080 expected (37.3%)
- Enfield — 366 received vs 2005 expected (18.3%)
- Greenwich — 700 received vs 1503 expected (46.6%)
- 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 — 454 received vs 1159 expected (39.2%)
- Merton — 0 received vs 1215 expected (0.0%)
- Newham — 35 received vs 1171 expected (3.0%)
- 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 — 386 received vs 957 expected (40.3%)
- Tower Hamlets — 158 received vs 1046 expected (15.1%)
- Waltham Forest — 0 received vs 1417 expected (0.0%)
- Wandsworth — 0 received vs 2368 expected (0.0%)
- Westminster — 42 received vs 4909 expected (0.9%)
- 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. 20.5% 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 Mar 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
Planning activity in the trailing 12 months totalled 9,621 applications received across the 5 London boroughs we track in full: Brent, Lambeth, Croydon, City of London, and Lewisham. Brent dominated the cohort with 2,978 applications, followed by Lambeth at 2,384 and Croydon at 2,015. The approval-rate figure is withheld this edition pending improved classification coverage — only 20.5% of the received population has been detailed to a decision outcome. Of the 1,159 decided applications in the window, the approval rate cannot be published without fuller coverage of the pipeline. Monthly volumes peaked in March 2026 at 1,243 received; the most recent month shows normal-range activity at 740 applications in April. The decision-lag metric indicates the pipeline is broadly current.