The 'Yo-yo Homes', revealed: How ex-council tenants make over £200k selling homes back to councils

Number 8 Frobisher Drive appears to be an ordinary house on an ordinary road in Swindon. Sitting at the end of a terrace of four houses behind a grass verge, its pitched roof, dark orange bricks and boxy windows are almost exactly how a child would draw a house. But behind the bricks and mortar is a story of serious money. 

Until March 2015, the property was a council house. Then the tenant decided to buy it under Right to Buy. For that, Swindon Council got £30,000. 

Records suggest it was sold in April 2021 when, in the space of six years, the owners managed to turn each pound into five, selling the house for £150,000. 

The buyer? Swindon Borough Council. The same council that had sold 8 Frobisher Drive bought the property back for five times the sale price, with the ex-tenant netting £120,000 in profit at the taxpayer’s expense. To add to this, Swindon council then spent a further £7,816 on repairs – putting its total loss at close to £130,000.

The house on Frobisher Drive is no anomaly. Big Issue has found examples of dozens of properties in a sample of councils across the country, sold off and then re-purchased at considerable loss. 

We call them Yo-yo Homes. They are part of a far bigger picture. One of how Right to Buy fed the housing crisis, ruined council finances, but got a select group of people rich. The best part is, this is the system working exactly as intended. 

Our investigation reveals the cost as councils try to reverse Right to Buy

Right to Buy has long been considered one of the UK’s biggest-ever wealth transfers, taking money from local authorities and putting it in the pockets of those lucky enough to be able to buy their own council homes. Some estimates put the value of that transfer at £200 billion. In the most comprehensive reforms in a generation, Keir Starmer’s Labour government has put the brakes on the policy. But much of the damage has been done.

A new Big Issue investigation has uncovered how the wealth transfer kept happening. We can reveal:

• More than 100 examples of Yo-yo Homes: Properties sold back to councils for hundreds of thousands in profit, just years after being bought at a discount. 
• Half the homes being purchased by councils are ones they previously sold off under Right to Buy. 
• In some cases, ex-council tenants are making over £200,000 in profit by selling homes back to the council just a few years after Right to Buy purchases. 

Florence Eshalomi MP, the chair of parliament’s housing select committee, said that our investigation “blatantly shows that the current Right to Buy policy isn’t working”. 

She added: “It is really worrying, especially when a number of councils are struggling in terms of day-to-day finances. A number of those councils are facing budgetary pressures because of temporary accommodation costs. If we had these homes, people could be rehoused.” 

‘An act of desperation’ 

A legacy of Thatcher’s government, Right to Buy gives councils no choice but to sell off homes at a discount to tenants who have lived in them for as little as three years. Data obtained by Big Issue under the Freedom of Information Act from 53 councils in England, shows these councils sold 20,836 homes under Right to Buy in the past five years, securing £2.25bn in the process. 

But the thing is, councils really, really need homes. A homelessness crisis is stretching budgets to breaking point. So much so that they’re willing to spend huge sums of money to get these properties back. These same 53 councils purchased 8,590 properties from 2020-2025, at a cost of £2.12bn. That’s an average of around £40 million per council. At least 4,414 of those – more than half – are properties previously sold under Right to Buy. In effect, councils are trying to reverse the Right to Buy while the government keeps the policy going. 

“Buying some of these properties back is almost certainly an act of desperation,” said Hollie Wright, an assistant researcher at the New Economics Foundation (NEF). “When we don’t have enough social homes and we’re not building them either, it’s a natural reaction for local authorities to want to buy them back.” 

Compare these sums and it’s stark: councils have spent almost the same amount as they’ve received – but found themselves down 12,246 homes. 

The councils in our sample – chosen because of their high social housing waiting lists – sold homes at an average cost of £107,000 and bought at an average cost of £247,000. Put it another way: were these councils to try and buy back all the homes they’d sold in this period of time, they’d come out £2.9bn worse off. 

The backdrop is a homelessness crisis. Across England, council spending on temporary accommodation rose by 25% in a single year to £2.8bn. A total of 169,050 children were living in temporary accommodation as of March 2025. Councils in London have warned some local authorities in the city could face bankruptcy after overspending their homelessness budgets by 60%. Faced with that dilemma, councils have little choice but to try and get the family silver back. 

Chris Hayes, chief economist at the Common Wealth think tank, told Big Issue: “A lot of councils have had to resort to selling school playing fields and other assets. The fact they’re willing to make huge losses on previously sold Right to Buy homes, even despite the state of their own finances, is quite an index of the housing crisis.” 

Navendu Mishra, MP for Stockport – where our findings show the council has bought back 27 ex-Right to Buy homes in the past five years but sold 246 homes through the scheme – told Big Issue: “This important investigation exposes the long-term damage Right to Buy is doing to our social housing stock. Councils are being forced to buy back homes they once owned, often at huge losses. This is unsustainable and I believe that the government urgently needs to rethink Right to Buy.” 

Read more:

• Right to Buy sold us down the river
• Andy Burnham: ‘Right to Buy scheme means homelessness will get worse before it gets better’
• Should we end Thatcher’s Right to Buy? How scrapping scheme could help solve UK’s housing crisis

Meet the Yo-yo Homes 

The battles over Right to Buy happen in millions and billions, adding up to a housing crisis on a national scale. But they begin on roads you might walk down every day, with houses you wouldn’t look twice at. And somebody is getting rich from Yo-yo Homes, while taxpayers pick up the bill. Take a property on Star Road in Isleworth, South London. In 2016, a tenant bought it under Right to Buy for £272,662. Just over six years later, in 2023, Hounslow Council bought the home for £575,000 – losing £302,338 on a single property. 

On Princes Road in the Cheshire town of Ellesmere Port, a property was sold under Right to Buy for £16,000 in 2016. Fast forward to 2024, and Cheshire West and Chester Council bought it back for £170,000 – over 10 times more than what they paid for it, barely eight years later. 

Or there’s 84 Castleton Road, a small terraced house in a Swindon cul-de-sac, purchased under Right to Buy by a tenant in 2020 for £108,500. Swindon Borough Council bought it back in 2025 for £240,000 – a loss of £131,500 in five years.

Hackney Council sold one property for £95,050 in 2014, only to buy it back for £365,000 in 2021 – a loss of £269,950 in six and a half years. 

These sit among more than 120 Yo-yo Homes uncovered by Big Issue, which have taken £15m from council finances and put them in the pockets of ex-tenants. The real losses to councils may be even greater, as records do not show how much money was kept by the council and how much was taken by Westminster. 

“Not only is it ripping off local authorities, but it’s completely distorting the housing market. You’re getting a situation where somebody’s getting £100,000 for nothing, and the balance sheet of the local authority is down £100,000,” said Wright. 

“That’s shocking, but what it says to me is that the Right to Buy system is not fit for purpose. It’s taking away the ability of local authorities to help people who need it.”  

Eshalomi said “we should be looking much deeper into this”. She added: “It’s actually taxpayers’ money, government money that’s going into purchasing these properties. It should be going in to repairs and maintenance on existing stock, and building new council properties. 

“But that’s not happening because councils [are] having to make these really difficult decisions.” 

Why do the Yo-yo Homes exist? It’s down to a loophole in the Right to Buy system. Anybody selling a home within 10 years of buying it through Right to Buy must first offer it to their old landlord, usually a council. That landlord has eight weeks to exercise the option to buy it for full market value. 

If this happens within the first five years, the resident must repay some of the discount, beginning at 100% in the first year, tapering down to 20% in the fifth year. After five years, a property can be sold back to the council and the discount can be turned into cash. Labour’s reforms will change some of this, potentially tightening the loophole. The government is lengthening the time during which discounts should be repaid from five years to 10, and councils will have a right of first refusal in perpetuity. 

But the sums being made raise issues of fairness, said Hayes. “The Right to Buy beneficiaries are able to enjoy a massive capital windfall that other households are not,” he said. “It takes the question of who is able to get into social housing into a much higher-stakes question.” 

Swindon Borough Council told us the Yo-yo Homes in this story had been purchased as part of a “wider initiative to provide homes for families in urgent need of accommodation” and were funded with its own cash and from Homes England.

A spokesperson added: “We would welcome any reforms to extend the Right to Buy discount period because, as these cases demonstrate, we would have been able to buy back these homes for considerably less money.”

Kingston Council told us they were acquiring properties for social housing and temporary accommodation, as well as regenerating the Cambridge Road Estate to add 871 council homes in the borough.

Councils try to reverse Right to Buy 

Our investigation uncovered big differences between areas when it comes to buying back lost council homes.  

Greenwich Council spent £79m buying back homes it had previously sold, Lambeth Council £70m and Hackney Council £38m. Outside of London, Leeds, Sheffield and Sandwell emerged as the councils buying back the most ex-Right to Buy homes. 

Some councils managed to buy more homes than they’ve lost – in effect reversing Right to Buy, though at great expense. Islington, Newham, Cornwall and Brighton and Hove councils managed to add more than 200 homes in the past five years. 

Elsewhere, however, purchases have not been nearly enough to make up for the homes being sold. Councils running some of the UK’s biggest cities have sold far more homes than they have been able to buy in the past five years. In total, Birmingham has lost 2,024 houses, Nottingham has lost 1,292 and Sheffield has lost 1,283. 

A leading housing expert said the housing should never have been sold off in the first place. Nick Gallent, housing professor at University College London, told Big Issue: “We’ve always known that Right to Buy was the biggest sale of public infrastructure, at massive discount, that has ever been seen in the UK. 

“But your study appears to show very clearly that the housing that was sold should have been retained, hence local authorities are trying to buy it back to meet urgent needs at huge cost.” 

Will Labour reforms stop Yo-yo Homes? 

Labour has declined to follow Scotland and Wales in abolishing Right to Buy entirely. Instead, it has launched a series of reforms branded an “attack on aspiration” by the Conservatives. 

New-build social housing will exempt from the policy for 35 years, while the time residents must live in a property before having the option to buy will increase from three years to 10 years. But at present these are just plans, with the government telling Big Issue they will “legislate when parliamentary time allows”.

The maximum discount, previously 70% of a home’s value up to £136,000 in London or £102,000 elsewhere, has decreased to a maximum of 15%. 

Experts said Labour’s reforms won’t necessarily stop Yo-yo Homes impoverishing councils in the here and now, with properties already sold unlikely to fall under the new rules, creating a stock ready to be flipped. Wright said our findings made the case for a limit on how much somebody can sell a home for if they’ve bought it through Right to Buy. 

“You can’t expect to get a massive discount at the behest of the taxpayer and local authorities and then expect to be selling your property at market rate when you didn’t buy it for market rate. It’s just not fair,” said Wright. “You’re expecting other people to foot the bill for your discount. I think that having a cap on what you’re able to sell it for, and probably sell it back to the council for, is very reasonable.” 

‘Councils cannot rely on building new homes’

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government told Big Issue that Right to Buy had played a part in the UK’s lack of social housing.

“There are simply not enough social homes because of the housing crisis we inherited, and we are giving councils greater flexibility to use Right to Buy receipts so they can build and buy more homes,” the spokesperson said.

“Our priority is to reform the scheme to better protect social housing stock and support councils to deliver new homes.

“We will continue to support long-term tenants to buy their homes, alongside building the biggest boost to social and affordable housing in a generation – backed by £39bn investment.”

Councillor Guy Nicholson, Hackney Council’s cabinet member for housing management and regeneration, told Big Issue the borough was delivering one of the country’s largest building programmes of affordable social housing.

“The scale of the demand for affordable homes means that the council cannot just rely on building new homes. Alongside this the council also buys back homes that have been sold via the Right to Buy initiative,” said Nicholson.

“This buy back programme makes an important contribution to the supply and availability of council homes. But to do this requires significant sums of money, which can only be raised through drawing on central government and mayor of London grants to complement the council’s own capital resources.”

A spokesperson for the Local Government Association said the governments reforms would help councils manage their housing stock.

“Local authorities see the long-term benefits from recent reforms of the Right to Buy scheme for boosting their stock of social housing, despite the sharp uptick in applications from people wanting to buy their council houses,” the spokesperson said.

“Local government is central to addressing the housing crisis that the country is facing, and these reforms will help councils maintain their existing housing stock, as well as expanding.

“The Right to Buy reforms are a step in the right direction for councils as they seek greater control over their housing stock, but we urge government to go further to ensure that local government is fully empowered to deliver the homes we desperately need.”

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