'Transforming Private Landlords' by Tony Crook & Peter A Kemp was published
in November by Wiley Blackwell: ISBN 978-1-4051-8415-1

Recent years have seen a sea change in attitudes to investment in private rental housing. Although private letting was one of the most important investment outlets in the nineteenth century, for much of the twentieth century private landlordism was in decline. Indeed, the privately rented sector witnessed net disinvestment by landlords for seven decades prior to the late 1980s.
Since then, however, there has been a significant revival of investment in private rental housing and growth in its market share. Meanwhile the image of private landlordism has greatly improved and the highly polarised attitudes of the past have been replaced by political consensus on the important role that landlords can play in housing provision.

An extensive array of government initiatives was introduced in order to attract new investment back into the private lettings market. This included rent deregulation, the Business Expansion Scheme, Housing Investment Trusts, and Real Estate Investment Trusts. Many of these initiatives were particularly aimed at enticing property companies and financial institutions into the residential lettings market. Yet the revival of letting has come from private individuals investing in so called ‘buy to let’ housing rather than from the corporate sector.

Transforming private landlords: housing, markets and public policy explores the origins, nature and extent of this revival in the fortunes of private landlordism. It present an in depth analysis of private landlords, the rationales for, and ways in which governments have sought to revitalise investment in residential lettings and their success in doing so. It assesses the extent to which landlordism has been transformed in recent years and the lessons for policy that can be learned from this experience.

The book addresses a major gap in the literature about an important actor in housing provision and the built environment. It draws on findings from the authors' research and interviews conducted with thousand of landlords in Britain.

Tony Crook is Professor Emeritus of Town & Regional Planning at the University of Sheffield and Peter Kemp is Barnett Professor of Social Policy at the University of Oxford