The Revival of Private Landlords in Britain’s Post-Homeownership Society

Abstract

Homeownership has been declining in favour of private renting in most developed English speaking countries since the early-2000s. Public debates in countries like Britain, Australia and the US have subsequently focused on the ostensible coming of age of 'generation rent', constituted of younger individuals excluded from home buying and traditional routes to housing asset accumulation. While the focus of this paper is the significance of access to housing assets as a means to offset potential economic and welfare precarity, our concern is landlords rather than tenants. Drawing on British survey data, we show that the rental boom has been accompanied by increasing multiple property ownership among classes of largely middle-aged and relatively affluent households. Over one-million small-time landlords have emerged in the last decade alone, who, we argue, are part product of historic developments in housing markets and welfare states. Generations of British have not only been orientated towards their homes as commodity assets, they have also begun to mobilise around multi-property accumulation in a context of shifting welfare and pension expectations. ARTICLE HISTORY

The Impact of Single-Family Rental REITs on Regional Housing Markets: A Case Study of Nashville, TN

“…In general, homeownership rates in the U.S. have declined since the great recession. The shift to what some scholars refer to as a "rentership society" [15] or the "generation rent" [20,21] phenomenon is found in a transnational context as a result of the global financial crisis. Consequently, single-family rentals are the fastest growing segment of the housing market; and the bulk of landlords remain small property entrepreneurs [22].…”

Does locality make a difference? The impact of housing allowance reforms on private landlords

“…Quantitative data has highlighted the diversity of landlords in terms of both their socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds and their property portfolios (DCLG, 2010;Lord et al, 2013;Wallace and Rugg, 2014). The recent entrance of institutional investors, such as private equity firms and financial institutions in helping drive the growth in the PRS, particularly in London and the South East, has also been highlighted; however this has been overshadowed by the growing importance of 'smalltime' landlords since the 1990s (Ronald and Kadi, 2016). In 2010, private individuals or couples accounted for 89 per cent of private landlords, up from 61 per cent in the early 1990s, and 81 per cent of these landlords owned just one let (DCLG, 2011).…”

Resurgent landlordism in a student city: urban dynamics of private rental growth

“…Landlordism is on the rise as market-liberal housing policies have allowed property owners to enjoy both higher rental yields and house price gains in countries including the United Kingdom, the United States and the Netherlands (Wind et al, 2020). Privaterental growth comes after decades of continuous decline and disinvestment and is driven by a highly diverse set of players, ranging from large institutions such as pension funds, corporations and investment trusts managing entire real-estate portfolios (Beswick et al, 2016;Fields, 2018;Wijburg et al, 2018) to private individuals owning a small number of properties as an insurance, future pension provision or speculative propertyalso known as buy-to-let (Aalbers et al, 2020;Ronald & Kadi, 2018).…”