This article applies Hirschmans’ concepts exit, voice and loyalty to a Swedish case of housing renovation in an estate with comparatively strong tenants. Renovations can be considered as shocks or critical junctures to an existing tenant-landlord relation, and therefore expose power relations on the housing market. Renovation processes are complex both technically and socially, and our study indicates that the exit, voice and loyalty framework is a useful tool for analysing such processes. In the case studied, tenants were not able to affect the renovation process per se, but tenant voice did affect the outcome in other respects. We argue that this strong tenant group represents an extreme ‘most likely’ case, making it possible to test the limits of tenant influence.