Astor Pulse // London Monthly
July 2026 Edition
The trailing 12-month read on planning approvals, residential sales, and Article 4 activity across the London boroughs we track.
Coverage expanding
This edition publishes 31 London boroughs, up from 9 in the 2026-06 edition — 22 newly added: Barking and Dagenham, Barnet, Bexley, Enfield, Hackney, Hammersmith and Fulham, Haringey, Harrow, Havering, Hillingdon, Hounslow, Islington, Kensington and Chelsea, Merton, Newham, Redbridge, Richmond upon Thames, Southwark, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest, Wandsworth, Westminster. We now track 92,064 applications against 13,394 last edition. Most of that step up is reach, not market movement: on a like-for-like basis — the same boroughs, the same 12-month window, the same data — volumes moved -1.8%. We have also deepened history behind the earlier edition’s own window by 88% as new sources landed.
Scope & coverage
Astor tracks 31 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
- Coverage expanded to 31 boroughs this month; like-for-like underlying market declined 1.8% in applications.
- 92,064 applications received across 31 boroughs over 12 months; 84.7% of 60,874 decided were approved.
- Westminster leads with 9,250 applications; Enfield reports 449 HMO signals — the highest of any borough.
02 // Planning Activity
Applications across the 31 London boroughs we track end to end.
Top 5 boroughs by application volume (received in window)
| Westminster | 9,250 |
| Barnet | 5,275 |
| Enfield | 4,346 |
| Wandsworth | 4,244 |
| Richmond upon Thames | 4,236 |
Volume can be influenced by how completely we have collected a council's data, 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)
| City of London | 99.6% 771 of 774 decided · 70.7% classified |
| Richmond upon Thames | 99.4% 2,007 of 2,020 decided · 73.3% classified |
| Southwark | 94.5% 2,482 of 2,626 decided · 98.8% classified |
| Hammersmith and Fulham | 94.4% 799 of 846 decided · 98.6% classified |
| Ealing | 93.6% 1,798 of 1,921 decided · 67.2% classified |
03 // Residential Sales
HMLR Price Paid — all 33 London boroughs.
HMLR confirmed-published through Jun 2026; later months on the chart are preliminary.
By property type
| Flat / maisonette | 26,515 · median £420,000 |
| Terraced | 16,399 · median £570,000 |
| Semi-detached | 9,355 · median £610,000 |
| Detached | 2,872 · median £850,000 |
Top 5 boroughs by sales volume
| Bromley | 3,711 |
| Wandsworth | 2,820 |
| Barnet | 2,651 |
| Bexley | 2,530 |
| Richmond upon Thames | 2,509 |
Astor read
Across all 33 London boroughs, 55,141 residential sales completed in the 12-month window to June 2026 (the latest month HMLR has fully published). Median resale price stands at £510,000. Flats dominate at 48.1% of volume and carry the lowest median (£420,000); terraced and semi-detached houses trade at £570,000 and £610,000 respectively. Sales flow has moderated in recent months — June published just 1,568 transactions (likely HMLR pipeline lag rather than a market cliff). Comparing confirmed months August 2025 to June 2026, medians have drifted lower from £540,000 to £509,000, suggesting mild downward pressure on values through spring 2026.
04 // HMO & Article 4 Watch
The regulatory landscape for landlords.
Top boroughs by HMO-flagged decisions (T12M)
| Enfield | 449 |
| Brent | 158 |
| Greenwich | 152 |
| Redbridge | 147 |
| Barnet | 124 |
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
2,081 applications flagged HMO signals across the tracked boroughs in the 12-month window; 1,040 were approved. Enfield leads by signal count (449), followed by Brent (158) and Greenwich (152). Article 4 HMO directions remain sparse — 25 active across all London — and 17 new A4 directions were designated in the window. Of 23 boroughs with active HMO Article 4, enforcement capacity and uptake remain uneven. For landlords, HMO approvals running at 39% of flagged received applications suggests meaningful rejection or withdrawal — worth monitoring borough by borough, particularly in higher-signalling authorities like Enfield and Brent.
05 // Outlook
What to watch next.
AI commentary unavailable for this edition — see the data tables above for the underlying signals.
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Methodology, denominators, and what we don't yet cover
- Window. Headline figures are trailing 12 months ending 31 Jul 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 collection from 23 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 31 borough(s) at
that confidence level.
- Barking and Dagenham — 1189 received, 154.3% of P120 expected
- Barnet — 5275 received, 191.4% of P120 expected
- Bexley — 2347 received, 168.2% of P120 expected
- Brent — 3166 received, 144.5% of P120 expected
- City of London — 1445 received, 268.3% of P120 expected
- Croydon — 3283 received, 189.0% of P120 expected
- Ealing — 4222 received, 203.0% of P120 expected
- Enfield — 4346 received, 216.8% of P120 expected
- Greenwich — 3119 received, 207.5% of P120 expected
- Hackney — 2405 received, 172.3% of P120 expected
- Hammersmith and Fulham — 2403 received, 162.5% of P120 expected
- Haringey — 2217 received, 153.7% of P120 expected
- Harrow — 1823 received, 123.7% of P120 expected
- Havering — 2499 received, 160.5% of P120 expected
- Hillingdon — 2688 received, 148.8% of P120 expected
- Hounslow — 2600 received, 182.5% of P120 expected
- Islington — 3138 received, 200.5% of P120 expected
- Kensington and Chelsea — 1508 received, 56.9% of P120 expected
- Kingston upon Thames — 2632 received, 227.1% of P120 expected
- Lambeth — 3335 received, 173.2% of P120 expected
- Lewisham — 1675 received, 123.7% of P120 expected
- Merton — 1491 received, 122.7% of P120 expected
- Newham — 2600 received, 222.0% of P120 expected
- Redbridge — 3542 received, 197.7% of P120 expected
- Richmond upon Thames — 4236 received, 215.7% of P120 expected
- Southwark — 3639 received, 210.4% of P120 expected
- Sutton — 1802 received, 188.2% of P120 expected
- Tower Hamlets — 1810 received, 173.0% of P120 expected
- Waltham Forest — 2135 received, 150.7% of P120 expected
- Wandsworth — 4244 received, 179.2% of P120 expected
- Westminster — 9250 received, 188.4% of P120 expected
- Bromley — 0 received vs 2347 expected (0.0%)
- Camden — 346 received vs 2317 expected (14.9%)
- 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
- Harrow — Integration not yet available
- 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. 88.7% of applications received in this window have been status-classified by our pipeline. The remainder are awaiting detail collection 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 Jun 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 collection × detail collection × 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
This edition tracks 92,064 applications across the 31 London boroughs we report on, reflecting a major expansion in coverage from nine boroughs in the prior edition. Like-for-like, applications declined 1.8% on a consistent footprint. Of 60,874 decided applications — 88.7% of the received population classified — 84.7% were approved. Westminster dominates by volume (9,250 received), followed by Barnet (5,275), Enfield (4,346), Wandsworth (4,244), and Richmond upon Thames (4,236). Approval rates are remarkably consistent; City of London (99.6%), Richmond (99.4%), and Southwark (94.5%) lead. Pending applications swell in recent months, notably 5,631 pending as of July — a signal of processing velocity tightening rather than decisiveness slipping.