Coliving Pulse #010 — Liverpool Would Put the Whole City Under Article 4, and the Displacement Number Is the Argument

Liverpool City Council's cabinet meets tomorrow to decide whether to bring in Article 4 directions covering the entire city. The directions would remove permitted development rights for small HMOs — homes for up to six unrelated people — meaning planning permission would be required to convert a house anywhere in Liverpool into one. Controls have applied in the city centre since 2021; the proposal extends them to places like Speke, Croxteth and Vauxhall that sit outside the current boundary.

The number in the cabinet report is the one to take away. The council's study found that over a three-year period, small HMOs inside the existing Article 4 area grew by 15 per cent. Outside it, they grew by 57 per cent. The control worked, and what it mostly did was move the growth somewhere else.

That single pair of figures is the whole Article 4 debate in miniature, and it cuts both ways. It is the strongest available argument for extending a direction citywide — partial coverage displaces rather than prevents. It is also the strongest available argument that the direction does not reduce demand for shared housing; it relocates the supply response, with a lag, into whichever streets are still permitted.

Implementation is staged. In some areas the expanded direction would come into force immediately: Kirkdale, Everton, County, Walton, Orrell Park and part of Fazakerley; part of Tuebrook Larkhill; Old Swan and part of Stoneycroft; Penny Lane and part of Calderstones; St Michaels and Sefton Park. For the majority of the city the stricter measures would not apply for another twelve months. If you hold or are underwriting small-HMO stock in Liverpool, that twelve-month line is the planning-risk boundary on your model.

Cllr Nick Small, cabinet member for growth and economy, framed it as managing concentration rather than discouraging the product: HMOs play an important role in meeting Liverpool's housing needs, but the council must be able to manage where new properties are created.

A note on method, because we got taught this last week. The cabinet decides tomorrow and we are publishing today — so this issue is anchored on the published cabinet report and its study, not on the vote. The report exists either way. Whichever way the cabinet goes, the 15-against-57 figure is now on the public record, and it will be quoted in every Article 4 argument in England for the next two years.

Since issue seven we have been watching for a second council to revoke an additional HMO licensing designation, after Telford and Wrekin withdrew theirs in full following a challenge to how it consulted. For three issues we reported the same thing: no second case, and one reversal is a precedent rather than a trend.

We can now close it, though not with the answer the question implied. No second reversal has appeared. What has appeared, with a council report behind it, is a council moving decisively the other way. Telford remains the only withdrawal we can evidence; the prevailing direction in English local authorities is tightening, not retreating.

The practical reading for an operator: do not plan on the Telford outcome repeating. What Telford established is narrow and procedural — that a defectively run consultation can be challenged successfully, and that councils know it now. It did not establish that additional licensing or Article 4 is in retreat. If anything, a council that has watched Telford lose on process is a council that will run its next consultation more carefully, not abandon it.

The date that still matters for anyone operating in the region: 15 December 2026, when the West Midlands becomes the first region required to join the national landlord database.

Principality Building Society has provided almost £28 million to fund Urban Centric's Traders Yard, a 182-apartment coliving development in central Cardiff beside the River Taff, near Central Quay and Cardiff Central station. The scheme has full planning permission and comes in two blocks: five storeys and 40 apartments completing in 2027, then thirteen storeys and 142 apartments in 2028. Amenity runs to a communal plaza, roof gardens, gym, dining room, coworking, lounges, games and cinema rooms.

The lender is the story. Coliving debt in the UK has mostly come from banks, specialist lenders and institutional capital; a mutual building society writing a development facility of this size into the sector is a different class of money arriving. Chad Griffiths of Principality tied it explicitly to strategy rather than opportunism, describing larger development funding of this kind as aligned with the growth plan for Principality Commercial. Urban Centric's managing director Andrew Woods noted a relationship with the lender spanning nearly two decades — which is the honest explanation for how a regional mutual gets comfortable with a product it has not historically funded.

It is also the second Cardiff coliving financing we have covered in a month. Issue six carried Handelsbanken refinancing Wales' first coliving scheme at £24.25 million, its first deal in the sector. Two different lenders, both new to coliving, both in the same city inside five weeks. Cardiff is not the largest coliving market in the UK, and that is rather the point: the lenders arriving are regional ones acting on local relationships, not a syndicate following an index.

In issue nine we said we would report back on two items. Neither has resolved, and we would rather say so than let them quietly disappear.

Squamish was scheduled to adopt its coliving development and amenity charges — CA$16,693 per private sleeping unit — on 6 October. Six days on, we cannot confirm the outcome. The local paper has not carried it, and the council's own meeting record for 6 October shows no published minutes. The charging bylaws and the coliving definition behind them had already passed three readings and remain on the public record regardless; the adoption vote changes the date they bite, not the text.

Knight Frank's Q3 2026 UK Build to Rent Market Update — the source of the figure that operational transactions took 61 per cent of this year's investment — still is not published on Knight Frank's own research page, where the latest edition remains Q2 2026 from 20 July. We used the figure in issue nine attributed to the trade report of it. We have not promoted it to a primary-sourced number and will not until the report is up.

A 45-storey, 134-metre tower at Arena Point on Merrion Way in Leeds opened for the 2026/27 academic year as the world's tallest purpose-built student accommodation building: 633 beds, £95 million gross development value, six years in the making, funded by Cain International and developed by Olympian Homes and RG Group. The amenity list — recording studio, photography studio, bookable study booths, gym, yoga studio, private dining, roof terrace — is worth reading next to the Cardiff coliving list above. The two products are specifying each other's buildings.

Tomorrow's Liverpool cabinet decision, and whether the 15-against-57 displacement figure starts appearing in other councils' Article 4 reports. A published number that settles an argument travels fast between planning departments.

Whether any further council follows Liverpool toward citywide rather than area-based Article 4 coverage. Citywide is a materially different proposition for an operator than a boundary you can site around.

The two unresolved items above: Squamish minutes, and Knight Frank's Q3 publication.