Understanding the role of private renting: a four-country case study

After decades of decline, private renting has started to expand again in some European countries, often as owner-occupation falls. Two projects supported by the Knowledge Centre for Housing Economics have looked at the reasons for decline and for increased interest in the sector as well as the factors which might lead to increased investment in private renting into the future. The first project looked at how regulation of the private rented sector (PRS) had developed since the 1980s in 11 European countries, and asked whether and how regulation and changes in regulation affected the scale of private renting across countries. The findings were clear: deregulation generally does not lead to growth in the PRS. With the clear exception of England, deregulation has generally been associated with continued decline in private renting. On the other hand, countries that still have large PRSs are generally quite highly regulated, but with sophisticated regulatory frameworks which provide considerable certainty for both landlords and tenants.