Home ownership in Europe is becoming increasingly challenging — not because of a lack of willingness to become a homeowner, but because young people just can’t buy a home. Global competition, urbanisation, demographics and government policy are some of the guilty parties. Many young people these days will be renting for a long time before they can buy. Young (and not so young) tenants need quality of service and certainty, something that many private landlords are not equipped to provide. Institutional landlords, by contrast, are. The implication is that the residential private rented sector (PRS) should be on the rise and, we expect, should remain on the rise for a long time.
But “should be on the rise” does not necessarily mean that it “will.” Indeed, there are plenty of national regulations and planning, landlord and tenant laws, etc, that make it hard for the institutional PRS to develop.
Therefore, the key question that we want to answer is the