On the hottest day the UK has ever recorded, searches on Rightmove for homes for sale with air conditioning nearly quadrupled against the same day a year earlier. That was 19 July 2022, the afternoon the thermometer at Coningsby in Lincolnshire read 40.3°C and Britain crossed a line it had never crossed before. Between raiding the freezer for ice lollies, begging the family fan to just spin faster, and cancelling on any plans that involved being outdoors (or indoors, for that matter), thousands of us were quietly deciding that enough was enough.
Rental searches told the same story, up around 180% on the day.
That is not the sort of spike you get from idle curiosity. It is the sort you get when people who were previously content with a fan and an open window decide, somewhere around the third sleepless night in a row, that they would quite like never to feel that way again.
What the Search Data Actually Shows
It is worth being precise about what Rightmove measured, because the numbers get mangled in retelling. Across July and early August 2022, searches for homes to buy with air conditioning ran 234% above the previous year. Rentals were up 74%. The near quadrupling was specific to that one record-breaking day.
The portal also tracked what estate agents were writing, which is a different signal entirely. Mentions of a ceiling fan in listings rose sevenfold. “Airy” rose sixfold, “shade” fivefold, alongside jumps for pergolas, awnings and north-facing aspects. That is not buyers searching harder. That is agents rewriting their particulars, having worked out that a certain kind of buyer is now scanning descriptions for any hint that a property will not turn into a greenhouse by mid-afternoon in July.
Both things matter, and they point the same way. Demand moved, and the people writing the listings noticed.
Four summers on, the pressure has not let up. The Met Office reports that 2026 has already delivered more days above 30°C than the whole of 1976, and became the first year on record to reach 35°C in May, June and July. Tellingly for anyone who has lain awake at 2 am, overnight temperatures have been tracking at record levels. The heat is no longer clocking off at sunset.
Estate Agents Are Seeing It from the Other Side of the Desk
One recent industry survey, conducted by Censuswide for Direct Line among 250 UK residential estate agents, found 95% reporting more buyers asking about built-in cooling, and close to 90% seeing more properties arrive on the market already fitted with it. Around 86% expected that demand to keep climbing.
The more interesting figure is the one that did not reach a majority. Just 36% of agents said air conditioning would actually increase the price offered for a property. So the profession is near unanimous that buyers are asking, and distinctly split on whether asking translates into paying. Hold onto that gap, because it explains most of the confusion in the next section.
There is a regional split too. Some 62% of Londoners said their homes get unbearably hot, against 40% of Scots. Across the UK as a whole, a companion survey of 2,000 adults found 52% saying the same.
Does It Actually Impact Value?
Here is where it gets contradictory depending on who you ask, and where a widely repeated headline deserves a second look.
Research by London agency Benham and Reeves is the source of the figure you will have seen quoted, which is that air conditioning can add £20,000 to the value of your home. Their working is transparent, to their credit. A 12,000 BTU wall-mounted unit costs roughly £1,900 installed. They estimate it lifts value by about 2.5%, which on the average UK house price of £277,484 comes to £6,937. Net gain per unit, a shade over £5,000. Fit four rooms, and you reach £20,000.
The assumption doing the heavy lifting is that the 2.5% uplift applies four separate times to the same house. In practice, valuers do not stack a percentage of total property value once per appliance, and a four-room install is unlikely to add 10% to what a home is worth. Treat £20,000 as the ceiling of an optimistic model rather than a number to budget against.
The 2.5% estimate itself is more defensible, and Which? has picked it up while pointing out the obvious caveat that returns depend enormously on property type and location. Other analysts put the direct uplift closer to nil on a standard suburban family home, while accepting it can genuinely shift the dial on a top-floor flat or a south-facing city property with a lot of glazing.
Where the evidence is stronger is lettings. Benham and Reeves report that homes with built-in air conditioning command around 15% higher rents on average, rising towards 20% during the hottest weeks. Landlords may find the maths works rather better than owner-occupiers do.
One more consideration that rarely makes the headlines. Bolting cooling onto a poorly insulated house increases total energy use, which can drag an EPC rating down rather than up. Fabric first is not just an environmental slogan; it is the sequence that protects your certificate.
Problem with British Houses
Supply has not caught up with demand, and the gap is stark. Air-conditioned homes account for roughly 1.9% of all listings across England, rising to only 2.8% in London and falling to 1% in the North West. That is a strange mismatch for a feature buyers increasingly ask about by name.
The reason sits in the brickwork. Most of the stock was built to hold heat in over a long, damp winter. Thick walls, small windows, loft insulation piled in to stop warmth escaping, decades of draughty gaps sealed up along the way. Nobody was thinking about a run of 35-degree days when they specified a two-bed semi in 1975.
The Climate Change Committee has put a number on where that leaves us. In its assessment of UK climate adaptation, it concluded that 92% of existing homes could overheat by 2050 under two degrees of warming, compared with just over half today. The committee defines overheating as a bedroom climbing above 26°C overnight for a sustained number of hours a year, which is a usefully unglamorous definition. It is not about discomfort in the conservatory. It is about whether you can sleep. Fewer than 5% of UK dwellings currently have any form of air conditioning at all.
Newer homes are not automatically exempt, but they are governed differently. Approved Document O came into force in June 2022 and requires new residential buildings in England to limit unwanted solar gain and provide an adequate means of removing excess heat. The Planning Portal’s guidance sets out how compliance is demonstrated. Crucially, it applies to new builds only, not to the Victorian terrace or the seventies semi where the problem is worst.
Rules Are Not What You Have Been Told
A persistent rumour holds that air conditioning is banned in British homes. It is not, and the government has said so directly. In a statement issued in June 2026, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government confirmed that air conditioning can be installed in both existing and new homes, and that in most cases planning permission is not required for a small home where the installation would not materially affect the building’s external appearance.
There is no blanket rule, though. Flats, leasehold properties, listed buildings and conservation areas all carry their own restrictions, and the department was explicit that people should check with their local council rather than assume.
The same statement carried a development worth more attention than it received. Boiler Upgrade Scheme grants are being extended to air-to-air heat pumps, which cool as well as heat, with £2,500 available to eligible homeowners in England and Wales, including privately rented properties. For anyone weighing a cooling install against a heating upgrade, that changes the sum considerably. One piece of kit, two seasons, a grant attached.
What a Good Install Actually Looks Like
Much of the residual scepticism about domestic air conditioning is really scepticism about a memory. The noisy, rattling box bolted to a shop wall in 1998 has done lasting reputational damage to a technology that has since moved on substantially.
Specification is where the difference is won or lost. Sizing to the room rather than to the sales brochure, siting the external unit where it will not become a neighbour dispute, sound levels, inverter efficiency, zoning so you are not cooling an empty box room, and scheduling so the system is not running against an open window. Installers handling F-gas refrigerants must be certified, which is worth verifying before any money changes hands.
The regional picture matters here too. Pershore in Worcestershire hit 38°C during this month’s heatwave, which is not a temperature the Three Counties were built around. Across that patch of the country, GSM Ltd designs and installs heating, ventilation and cooling systems for domestic and commercial properties from their base in Gloucestershire, working across Gloucester, Cheltenham, Worcester and Hereford with in-house design and fabrication. The broader point holds wherever you are: a system designed around the building tends to outperform one selected from a catalogue.
What Buyers Are Really Circling Toward
Which is probably why the sharpest agents are steering conversations beyond the air-con unit itself. South-facing rooms, glazing ratios, cross-ventilation, external shading and how a loft space behaves in August all come up now in a way they did not a decade ago.
A retrofitted unit solves a problem. A home that was never going to have the problem in the first place is the thing buyers seem to be gravitating toward, even if they do not quite phrase it that way when they walk through the door. The Met Office now puts the odds of the UK seeing 40°C again within the next twelve years at roughly even. On that timescale, how a house handles heat stops being a lifestyle preference and starts being a straightforward question about whether it is fit for the climate it stands in.
