Why the open market is slow for this one
Most landlords selling up are not in difficulty. The arithmetic changed — Section 24 altered how mortgage interest is treated, borrowing costs rose, the efficiency rules kept moving — and the return stopped justifying the attention. That is a commercial decision and it needs no explaining to us.
What catches people out is why this sale is harder than the last house they sold. A tenanted property is not offered to the same market as an empty one. Buyers of an ordinary house need a residential mortgage, and residential lenders will not generally lend on a property with a tenant in it. That removes owner-occupiers — the largest part of the buying public — and leaves other landlords, most of whom are doing the same sums and reaching the same conclusion.
The standard advice is to get vacant possession and sell it empty. That means ending a tenancy before you have a buyer, carrying the void yourself, and hoping the market you sell into is the one you expected when you started.
What happens to the tenancy
In the ordinary case, nothing. An assured shorthold tenancy — which is most lets — runs with the property rather than the landlord, so we buy subject to it. The agreement carries on under its existing terms, the rent stays what it is, and the tenant wakes up the day after completion in the position they were in the day before. They get a letter telling them who to pay. From their side, that is the whole change.
Older tenancy types do not all behave this way and your solicitor will confirm how it applies to yours. What we can say plainly is that we are not asking you to hand the property over empty, and nobody is served notice as part of a sale to us.