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Once a month, auction specialist Jay Howard from Hammered Auctions joins us to report from the front line of UK property auctions.

Jay and his business partner Piotr Rusinek are property traders, authors of the UK's number one bestselling book on auctions, and the people behind the Auction Buyers Club, Property Trading Academy and Beyond the Hammer

This month: a market that’s quietly holding up better than the summer calendar would suggest, a legal documentation problem that’s quietly costing tenanted property sellers thousands, and a niche flat-buying strategy that exactly one investor at a Manchester event has already started running.

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We discuss:

The Market: Stronger Than the Season Suggests

The conventional assumption is that August is a slow month for auctions — school holidays, thin rooms, cautious sellers.

Jay watched both the Savills two-day auction and the Auction House London auction closely, and both performed better than the seasonal expectation.

He and Piotr were selling around 50 properties for clients across July and August, and those were going well.

The overall market, Jay says, has strength and resilience — but that headline masks two specific areas where things are not going well.

Problem 1: Tenanted Properties Are Failing at Auction

Residential tenanted properties are struggling to sell — and Jay’s diagnosis is specific.

The legal packs being submitted by sellers simply don’t contain enough documentation to make a buyer comfortable.

The Renters Rights Act has raised the compliance bar significantly: Legionnaires’ disease checks, EPCs, boiler safety certificates, right to rent checks, and around 15 other documents all need to be present, signed, and initialled by the tenant.

Jay estimates he sees a complete compliance document suite in roughly one in every 30 to 40 legal packs for a tenanted property.

The consequence is straightforward: the buyer prices in a worst-case-scenario risk discount, and the seller bears the cost of their own paperwork gap.

His point is equally straightforward: if you have all of that documentation anyway, include it.

Why disadvantage yourself at auction by leaving it out?

Yield Value vs Capital Value: What Sellers Are Getting Wrong

There’s a related pricing problem Jay identifies for tenanted properties: sellers are still pricing on a yield basis rather than accounting for the compliance risk discount buyers are applying.

He uses a South Yorkshire two-bedroom house as an example: capital value £75,000, renting at £925 per month, investment value on yield around £95“100,000.

The gap between those two numbers is what a seller is hoping to capture by selling tenanted.

But without a clean legal pack, the buyer’s risk discount closes that gap entirely.

Some auctioneers are using a hybrid model — a figure between capital value and investment value — but that only works when the documentation supports the higher number.

Problem 2: Flats Are Still Struggling

Flats remain one of the most difficult asset classes to move at auction.

They’re also the stickiest stock on the open market, which is how many of them end up at auction in the first place — sellers exhaust the estate agency route and want a result.

Jay has been unable to find anyone who can point to a single clear structural reason why flats are underperforming at this level.

His conclusion: it’s sentiment.

Cladding issues, leasehold reform, ground rent concerns, service charge uncertainty — none of these necessarily affect a specific flat, but the noise around all of them is weighing on the whole category.

Jay’s observation: most properties with genuine cladding issues now have insurance and remedies in place.

The discount buyers are demanding in many cases reflects fear, not facts.

The Opportunity: Buying Discounted Flats Post-Auction

At a paddle event in Manchester earlier this year, Jay met an investor who has built a niche strategy specifically around this dynamic.

He is buying executive and high-rise flats that have been through the auction process, failed to sell, and dropped in price to around 2016 levels on a pound-per-square-foot basis.

His hold period is a minimum of two to five years, with some held for ten to fifteen.

The logic is simple: if the floor is approximately 2016 pricing and sentiment rather than structural damage is driving the discount, the downside is limited and the upside — over a long enough hold — is significant.

As Jay puts it: where others fear to tread, there’s opportunity.

Key Takeaways

The summer auction market is holding up better than seasonal expectations suggest.

Tenanted properties are underperforming at auction primarily because legal packs are missing compliance documentation — a self-inflicted discount.

If you’re selling a tenanted property at auction, include every compliance document: Legionnaires’, EPC, boiler safety cert, right to rent, and all tenancy correspondence.

Flats are struggling at auction and on the open market, but the primary driver appears to be sentiment rather than structural issues.

For investors with a long hold horizon, buying discounted flats at post-2016 price levels is a strategy at least one buyer is already executing.

Where others fear to tread, there is opportunity.