What tenants searched for in 2025 – and what they got

What were tenants looking for in 2025? Rightmove has revealed their top keywords when searching for a place to live.

Pet-friendly properties topped the list. Renting with pets can be a challenge: research by Battersea Dogs & Cats Home found that only 7% of rental listings were for pet-friendly properties in 2021. But from May 2026, things could get easier for pet-loving tenants as the Renters’ Rights Act will make it harder for landlords to ban pets from their properties.

After pet-friendliness, tenants are looking for a garage, a furnished home, a garden, and bills included – in that order.

How likely are they to get those things? A couple of them can be estimated from the latest English Housing Survey. It shows that 63% of privately rented properties have private outdoor space, down from 67% in 2019. That’s compared to 92% of owner-occupied homes. However, most of the remaining privately rented homes still have access to shared outdoor space. Only 5% have no outdoor space at all.

While the survey doesn’t track how many homes have garages, it does show that the types of home least likely to have them are well represented in the PRS. 43.6% of privately rented homes are flats, compared to less than 10% of owner-occupied homes. Terraced homes, which rarely have garages, make up another 33.1% of PRS homes compared to 26.2% of owner-occupied homes.

What about bills? These aren’t tracked in the English Housing Survey, but research by estate agency Benham & Reeves earlier this year found that just 16% of rentals included bills in the rent. These tend to be student lets, build-to-rent properties and HMOs, so tenants looking for other dwelling types (a pet-friendly home with a garden and a garage, for example) will find it tougher to find a bills-included home.

However, the most critical challenge may be finding a home to rent at all. The English Housing Survey shows that the private rented sector has barely grown in almost a decade. There were just over 4.7 million privately rented homes in England in 2024-25, only around 20,000 more than in 2016-17. In that same time, the Office for National Statistics estimates that the population in England has grown by more than 3 million people.