Relet or sell? There is a third option, and most landlords never hear about it.

By the Nock Deighton lettings team | September 2026

If you own a rental property in Shropshire or Worcestershire, there is a fair chance you have already had this conversation with yourself. Perhaps a tenant handed in notice and forced it. Perhaps nothing has happened at all and you simply keep turning it over on a Sunday evening.

Almost every landlord who reaches that point believes there are two options. Find another tenant, or sell up.

There are three. And the one nobody tells you about is often the best of them.

There are also two versions of this moment, and they are not the same. In the first, your tenant has given notice and the property will be empty anyway, so your choice really is just relet or sell. In the second, you are the one who wants out and your tenant is staying put. That second version is the harder one, and it is where the third door matters most.

Reletting is the option most landlords dismiss too quickly

Take the local numbers seriously before you rule it out.

Office for National Statistics figures put the average private rent in Shropshire at £817 in June, up 3.9% over the year, with the wider West Midlands up 4.4%. The supply of rental homes is still well below pre-pandemic levels, which means more tenants competing for fewer homes across Bridgnorth, Telford, Ludlow, Shrewsbury and Kidderminster.

An asset producing more income every year, in a market where demand outstrips supply, is not an obvious thing to give up. If what has worn you down is the admin rather than the asset, reletting is very likely the right answer, and it is worth knowing that before you close the door on it.

Selling with the property empty costs more than you think

This is the door most landlords assume they will take, and it is the most expensive of the three if your tenant is staying.

Since 1 May 2026, getting your tenant out so you can sell the property empty means using a legal reason called Ground 1A. It needs at least four months’ notice, and that notice cannot take effect within the first twelve months of the tenancy. Then add the time to find a buyer and complete, which government figures put at around 120 days on average.

Then there is the part that catches people out. Once you have used Ground 1A, you cannot re-let or even advertise the property to let for twelve months. Not if the buyer pulls out. Not if the chain collapses. Penalties reach £40,000. Your mortgage, insurance and council tax keep running on an empty house, and the law says you cannot take a penny of rent on it.

And you would be selling into a market where the number of homes for sale sits at a twelve-year high for this time of year, asking prices are 1.0% below where they were twelve months ago, and Rightmove has cut its forecast for 2026 from a 2% rise to somewhere between no change and a 2% fall.

Selling empty is not wrong. It is just slower, more expensive and riskier than most landlords realise at the point they decide on it.

You can sell with your tenant staying exactly where they are

Here is the option almost nobody mentions. You sell the property to another landlord, with the tenancy running and the tenant staying put.

Look at what changes. You serve no notice, so Ground 1A never applies and neither does the twelve-month ban that comes with it. The rent keeps arriving every month right up to the day you complete, and there is no void at either end. There is no empty house generating bills. And nobody has to move out, which matters if you have had a good tenant for years and the thought of putting them through an eviction is part of what has been keeping you awake.

For managed landlords who take our rent guarantee, that income is underwritten by a master insurance policy right through to completion, with any claim handled by us rather than by you. A buyer weighing up an income stream likes to see that every bit as much as you do.

And there are buyers. In June, for the first time since 2019, landlords across Britain bought more properties than they sold. While the headlines were busy with the exit, experienced investors were quietly using it.

We keep a register of those buyers locally. When a landlord decides to leave, we match the property to investors on that list rather than putting it straight on the open market. And because many of these properties have been under our management, what the buyer receives is not a seller’s claim about the rent. It is a file we can open: the payment record, the maintenance log, the compliance certificates, the tenancy itself. That is precisely why these sales get agreed, and why they get agreed quickly.

Be clear-eyed about price. A tenanted sale is priced on the income the property produces, so the headline figure can differ from a vacant sale. But headline against headline is the wrong comparison. The right one is a tenanted price with the rent still running, set against a vacant price minus four months of notice, a void, months of empty-house bills, and the risk of a sale that falls through and leaves you unable to re-let for a year.

Run those two properly and the third door wins more often than landlords expect.

The decision that costs you money is the one made too late

Here is the part worth taking away, whichever door turns out to suit you.

The moment you serve notice under Ground 1A, you close door one and door three. Both of them. You cannot relet, and you cannot sell to an investor with a sitting tenant, because you have already started the process of removing the tenant.

So the expensive mistake is almost never choosing the wrong door. It is choosing before you have looked at all three.

Which is why we would far rather hear from you the week you start thinking about it than the week after you have served something.

If we only found your tenant

If you are a let-only landlord, we found and vetted that tenant for you. Every applicant went through our qualification process before you were asked to approve them, and you have handled everything since.

That vetting is why your tenancy has a payment record worth showing a buyer. But the rent record, the maintenance history and the compliance file are the rest of the picture, and between them they are what makes a fast relet possible and a tenanted sale credible. Managed landlords have all of it as a matter of course. Everyone else assembles it in a hurry at the exact moment they need it most.

Getting the right tenant in has never mattered more, now that the wrong one is so much harder to remove. It is worth asking whether the people who did that part for you should be doing the rest of it too.

Get the number before you need it

You cannot weigh three options without knowing what your property is worth today.

A rental review takes very little of your time. We will tell you what your property would let for in the current market, whether your rent has drifted behind it, and how that sits against what the property would sell for both with and without a tenant in place. No pressure in any direction. Just the numbers you need to make the decision properly, whenever you come to make it.

We are number one for lettings in Bridgnorth and have been letting across Shropshire for more than forty years. We have watched a great many landlords make this decision. The ones who do well are simply the ones who looked at all three options before they picked one.

Book a free rental review with your local Nock Deighton office.