Now it's tenants, not homes, that are under the hammer

Reviewing Nick Bano's Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis for Liberator, I wrote:

Fifty years ago, private landlords, from Rachman to Rigsby, were derided and the breed seemed to be on the way out. Now daytime television shows have would-be buy-to-let landlords as their heroes.

I've a feeling I lifted at least some of that from the book.

Now James Bloodworth has expanded the point into a very good blog post:

Homes Under the Hammer first aired in 2003, the same year that home ownership in Britain peaked at 70 per cent. Until the mid-1990s the private rental market made up just 9 per cent of UK households. Since then the number of private rentals has more than doubled. As of 2023, around 19 per cent of UK households - about 5.4 million homes - were privately rented. 

Today there are 2.8 million landlords in Britain, and the average age of a private renter in England has risen to 41. Meanwhile, home ownership has fallen to 65 per cent, and fewer than one-third of Londoners aged 20–39 own a home.

As the economy has changed, so has Homes Under the Hammer. In its early years the programme would often feature people who were simply looking for a place to live. These days buyers are usually more interested in the sales value or ‘rental yield’ of the property, which they view as an ‘investment’. 

Every episode follows more or less the same formula. A middle aged married couple rip the character out of a two bedroom house and turn it into a white-and-grey HMO (houses in multiple occupation) with 12 bedrooms. A woman named Michelle turns a derelict public toilet into four holiday lets. A property developer named Lenin (yes really) boasts of making a 15 per cent yield on a terraced house in Stoke-on-Trent.

It's well worth reading the whole thing.

I recently posted a video here in which Nick Bano sets out his arguments on the evils of landlordism.