What the kindness recession means for estate agency

The train was rammed. Every seat taken; the sort of journey where you try to find a patch to stand, and just hope that it isn’t outside the toilet.

An elderly lady was standing a few feet from me, visibly struggling. After a few minutes she wrestled her suitcase flat on the floor, and lowered herself onto it – a makeshift chair, wedged between two rows of seated passengers, none of whom moved.

Not one person offered her a seat, and I don’t think it was because they were monsters. I think it was because a carriage full of tired, skint, overworked people had decided that whatever they had, they were keeping.

The moment stuck with me; I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had witnessed similar scenes more often lately, as though social selfishness is increasingly pervading everyday life.
The kindness recession

It turns out it isn’t just a feeling.

The Charities Aid Foundation’s UK Giving Report 2026 makes for grim reading. The British public gave an estimated £14bn to charity in 2025, down from £15.4bn the year before – the first fall in total giving since 2021. Average donations dropped from £72 to £65, around 2.8 million people cancelled a regular gift.

But the longer trend is the one that should worry us. In 2016, 69% of UK adults donated to charity or sponsored someone. By 2025, that was 55%. That’s roughly six million fewer donors; CAF reckons the sector has missed out on £12.4bn as a result, which is about a full year’s worth of giving simply evaporating.

Affordability is the headline reason: 49% of non-donors say they simply can’t afford it, which is entirely fair enough when the mortgage has gone up by four hundred quid a month. But affordability isn’t the whole story – 28% of non-donors said they just weren’t interested in charities. As CAF’s Philippa Cornish put it, giving is no longer a habit in this country.

That’s the bit that nags at me. Because a recession in money is temporary, but a recession in the habit of generosity is something else entirely – and it looks an awful lot like a carriage full of people staring out of the window.

The selfish case for being generous

Here’s the surprising thing about kindness: the research says the person who benefits most is usually the one doing it.

A systematic review of kindness interventions found that performing acts of kindness reliably improved the wellbeing of the person doing the kind thing. And it gets more interesting when you look at the physical stuff – a 2024 randomised controlled trial in Hong Kong assigned hundreds of adults to six months of volunteering. The volunteers came out with measurable improvements in loneliness, social engagement, stress and depressive symptoms.

One researcher went further and put 73 older adults with diagnosed hypertension into a three-week trial, giving them money to spend either on themselves or on other people. The ones who spent on others saw blood pressure drop by comparable levels as starting a new blood pressure medication or a serious exercise regime.

And one other review of volunteering among adults aged 65 and over found that it actually prolonged mortality. Read that again – giving appears to be associated with living longer.

All of which correlates with what I discovered, almost by accident. I was in a mental rut earlier this year, and rather than doing anything sensible about it, I decided to organise a 24-hour charity webinar, with guests from across the industry delivering talks and training. It was, by any rational measure, an absurd thing to do – but the joy of social and charitable giving has helped my mental wellbeing immeasurably.

What this means for estate agency

But for all my lamentations of society’s altruistic decline, the fact is that as an industry property does this rather well.

Agents Giving supports charitable initiatives across the sector; Agents Together pairs mentors with mentees, free of charge; The Propertymark Trust provides grants, hardship support and qualification bursaries to those in need; WiEA’s Walk for Sarah sets off again in August.

While this is to be applauded for altruistic reasons, the business case for it is also getting stronger. One analysis of nearly 90,000 participants, found that employees’ perceptions of their employer’s social impact correlated remarkably strongly with engagement, and negatively with turnover intention, with the return on employer-supported volunteering in the UK at somewhere between £1.50 and £3.60 of benefit for every £1 spent – largely through reduced sickness absence and improved performance.

On the customer side, PwC’s 2024 global consumer survey found people willing to pay an average premium of 9.7% for sustainably produced goods. And the research is consistent on one point that matters enormously for us: actual social impact outperforms performative, disconnected charity by a distance.

In other words, a cheque to a national charity you have no relationship with does less for you than sponsoring the under-11s, running the food bank collection point in your window, or giving your negotiators a paid day to go and do something useful in the community.
The bit where I mention marketing, and you wince

There’s an obvious risk here – the moment generosity becomes a campaign, it stops working. Porter Novelli’s research found 47% of consumers would stop or reduce buying from a company that backtracked on its social commitments, and employee research is clear that performative giving in a badly-run business actually corrodes trust.

But the inverse is also true: most agents I know do genuinely decent things in their communities and then never mention them, out of a very British embarrassment about looking like they’re showing off. In a market where six million people have stopped giving and the national mood is one of clenched self-preservation, being the business on the high street that visibly hasn’t stopped is a very powerful position.

Do it because it’s right, because the evidence says it’ll lower your blood pressure and improve your team’s performance. Then, having done it properly, tell people – that order matters.

We’re all standing in that train carriage now – tired, squeezed, working harder to hold on to what we’ve got, and subconsciously deciding that generosity is somebody else’s job this year.

The research says the person who stands up might lose their seat, but they gain so much more.

Toby Martin is the host of 24-Hour Open House, a free-to-watch webinar in support of Breast Cancer Now and Andy’s Man Club: www.24hourwebinar.com