Share this article
Leeds has one of the largest build to rent markets in the UK outside London. The city drew £281m of investment into the sector in 2025, which put it third among the regional markets. Across five years the total is £1.3bn, against under £400m in the five years before that. Around 11,300 homes are now either operational or in development.
When we first wrote this article in 2017, we suggested 6 sites which we believed at the most potential. Now, 9 years later, we’re back to let you know how right (or wrong) we were. Below is where the major schemes stand, what is still to come, and what the market data shows.
Work began on the former Yorkshire Post site in October 2018. The first phase of 242 apartments was forward sold to Grainger, who own and manage it, and it opened as The Headline in 2021.
The rest of the site has been slower – a 2019 proposal for two rental buildings and a hotel was dropped after wind and microclimate problems that could not be designed out.
Councillors approved three replacement blocks in February 2023, totalling more than 2,000 residential and student flats. In February 2026 BlueCastle Capital completed the purchase of the freehold from Prescient Capital, with existing consent for 348 build to rent homes.
Unfortunately, the Yorkshire Post clock tower has deteriorated badly while the site waits, and a public campaign to save it started earlier this year – it remains the most recognisable thing on the site.
Hume House was demolished and replaced by Altus House, a 37 storey tower on Merrion Way completed in 2021 with more than 752 student units.
Cirrus Point, a 45 storey student building of 135m in the Arena Quarter, took the title in 2025. Before that it was Altus House, which had held it since 2021, and before that Bridgewater Place.
The application for 224 apartments on Springwell Road in Holbeck went to plans panel in 2017 and came forward as Springwell Gardens. CityLife delivered 223 one, two and three bedroom apartments, all now complete.
However, the flats sold to private investors as individual units rather than operating as a single managed block, so the scheme sits in the private rented sector rather than the build to rent pipeline. It is a useful illustration of the difference.
This is CEG’s Temple district – Leeds City Council approved the hybrid application in April 2018, with outline permission for 1.1m sq ft of offices, retail, leisure and hotel space alongside 750 homes. The first building, the seven storey Globe Point at 37,800 sq ft, completed in 2022.
Separately, Heim Global Investor is delivering 375 build to rent homes on Water Lane with McLaren Living, across two blocks of between 12 and 26 storeys, due in January 2027.
Delivered and occupied. Legal & General welcomed its first residents in early 2021, then committed a further £57m to the neighbouring Tower Works site for 245 more apartments. That takes the combined total to 500 homes.
Consented and moving, but not yet built. A £270m scheme won full planning consent in 2021 for two build to rent towers of 33 and 22 storeys with 629 apartments, a 24 storey student building with 548 beds, a 15 storey aparthotel and offices. Marrico and Helios bought the site from the council in 2024. The student phase is on site first, and the 578 home build to rent element is due to start in the final quarter of 2026.
Glenbrook and Legal & General completed 500 build to rent homes here in April 2026, across two buildings of 19 and 16 storeys. It was one of the first residential developments in the UK to achieve Gateway 3 approval under the Building Safety Act. Gateway 3 is the sign-off required before residents can occupy a higher-risk building, and delays at that stage have held up completions across the sector.
A 45 storey hexagonal tower of 141m, delivering 464 rental homes. Leeds City Council approved it in April 2024 as part of McLaren’s 2.47 acre mixed use scheme. It sits in the LS1 legal and financial quarter, close to Wellington Place.
488 rental homes completed in 2025 by HUB with Bridges. Residents get a bowling alley, gym, cinema room, co-working space and a rooftop terrace, which shows where the amenity end of the market has gone.
Cole Waterhouse and Domis broke ground on the first phase of 239 build to rent homes in December 2025. The full £200m scheme is set to bring at least 1,000 homes and a public square. Phase one completes in spring 2028.
Vastint’s 24 acre redevelopment of the former Tetley’s brewery site: more than 800,000 sq ft of offices, 1,350 homes and an eight acre park. The wider project is expected to complete by 2032. It is the clearest example of the placemaking approach now common across Leeds South Bank.
451 apartments forming the first phase of Sweetfields. The building topped out in November 2025 and completes in early 2027.
Most of the activity above sits in or around Leeds South Bank, one of the largest regeneration areas in Europe and roughly the size of the existing city centre. The government’s New Towns Taskforce has named it one of twelve preferred locations nationally, with potential for up to 13,000 new homes.
For scale, the council’s adopted Core Strategy sets a citywide requirement of 3,247 homes a year. South Bank on its own could carry roughly four years of the city’s total housing need.
The designation moves South Bank from a local regeneration project to a national priority, which affects funding, infrastructure and the confidence of investors looking at the area.
Less discussed in rental coverage, but worth knowing about. The Leeds Innovation Arc covers around 370 acres on the western side of the city centre, running from the university campuses and hospital through the civic core towards Park Square, Wellington Place and the River Aire. Leeds City Council has adopted a Supplementary Planning Document for it.
The Arc is not a housing scheme. It carries over 3,000 new homes in and around it, but its purpose is employment, and the West Yorkshire Investment Zone has accelerated the Innovation Village phase on the Leeds General Infirmary site. For anyone looking at where rental demand comes from, the Arc is a jobs story before it is a housing one.
Three of the buildings in this article are purpose-built student accommodation, or PBSA, rather than build to rent: Altus House, Cirrus Point and the student phase at Lisbon Street. The two markets are often reported together because they share sites, investors and contractors, but they are separate products with different demand cycles.
Co-living is the newer category, sitting between the two, with smaller private units and larger shared spaces. Leeds has relatively little of it so far, though the amenity provision at schemes like Uncle Leeds points in that direction.
Housing designed and built as rental accommodation from the outset, owned by a single institutional investor and managed as one operation, rather than sold off as individual flats.
The two terms get used interchangeably and they should not be.
The private rented sector, or PRS, covers all privately rented housing, including the millions of homes let by small landlords. The latest English Housing Survey records 4.7 million households in the sector, which is 19% of the England total.
Build to rent, or BTR, is a much smaller part of that. It means blocks designed from the outset as rental homes, owned by a single institutional investor and managed as one operation rather than sold off flat by flat.
The adopted Core Strategy sets a requirement of 3,247 homes a year.
To put it bluntly, more people equals more business. Leeds now has around 11,300 build to rent homes built or on the way, and the level of investment coming in suggests that will hold. The effect is a city centre with far more people living in it, and that growth is spreading outwards along two corridors in particular. Both of them run past our estates.
Cardigan Trading Estate sits on Kirkstall Road, and the road either side of it is being rebuilt.
The largest scheme is Dyecoats, Latimer’s redevelopment of the former Yorkshire Chemicals site for Clarion Housing Group. The 12.1 acre site has outline approval for 1,853 apartments.
The eastern element is consented for 806 apartments with ground floor commercial and community space, a riverside promenade and public realm, and three blocks are already under construction. The masterplan includes a riverside park, a new river crossing, a food hall, independent shops, cafés and public workspaces. The wider project runs to 2029.
Close by, Glenbrook has a 618 apartment build to rent scheme across five riverside buildings, forward funded at £152m. The former Arla Foods office site, vacant since 2016, has outline consent for 631 homes in build to rent blocks of between seven and 16 storeys.
Kirkstall is also named in Leeds City Council’s Innovation Arc planning document as one of the residential neighbourhoods adjoining the Arc, alongside Burley, Woodhouse and Little London. The Arc runs west from the universities and hospital towards Park Square, Wellington Place and the River Aire, which places Kirkstall Road at the end of the city’s main employment growth corridor rather than out on its own.
The practical point for anyone taking space at Cardigan Mills is that several thousand homes are arriving along the same road over the next few years, on a stretch that saw very little change for decades.
Our Cross Green estate sits on Cross Green Lane, at the point where the city centre gives way to the Aire Valley. The residential growth here is not a forecast. Most of it is already built and occupied, and it is directly across the road.
On the other side of South Accommodation Road is Citu’s Climate Innovation District, an £800m scheme forming part of the South Bank Leeds regeneration. It covers both banks of the River Aire, linked by a pedestrian bridge, and delivers more than 500 low energy homes alongside manufacturing, leisure, offices and public realm. The first residents moved in during early 2019. Aire Lofts, District Lofts and Landing Place are all part of it, and all are within sight of the estate.
Phase 1b added 142 homes with completion in December 2025, supported by the West Yorkshire Combined Authority’s Brownfield Housing Fund. Phase 2 brings a further 247 apartments across 12 buildings on a 3.5 acre site between Clarence Road and the river, ranging from three to 10 storeys, with six commercial units totalling 8,500 sq ft.
Immediately west of the estate are the Echo Central blocks. Leeds Dock, Clarence Dock Village and the Royal Armouries are a short walk along the river, and Rose Wharf sits just north on East Street.
Cross Green sits inside Aire Valley Leeds, the council’s largest regeneration area, covering 1,300 hectares along both banks of the Aire from the city centre out to the M1, with over 400 hectares of development land and Enterprise Zone status. The East Leeds Link Road puts the motorway network within easy reach without going back through town.
You can walk into the city centre, you have several hundred households on the other side of the road with more being built, and you have motorway access in the opposite direction. For a trade, a workshop, a food or drink producer or a service business working into the city, there are not many places in Leeds that offer all three. Piglove Brewing is one of the businesses already operating from the estate.
Written by
Offices, studios and industrial units to let across Leeds and Rotherham. Tell us what you need and when, and we’ll come back to you within one working day.