The housing prospects for young people in the UK were completely changed by the global financial crisis of 2007-09. While the government largely succeeded in rescuing the banks and the housing market, it created an environment where house prices remained high and mortgages were only available to those who could afford hefty deposits. As a result, many young people who might have got a foot on the property ladder were forced to keep renting.
While this has prompted much concern in recent years about the prospects for “generation rent”, the flipside is that it created an investment opportunity. To meet the demands of this demographic, property investors started putting billions of pounds into a new housing class known as build-to-rent (BTR).
To understand this shift, we’ve been researching the rise of these properties in one of the UK’s leading cities, Manchester. It demonstrates a change in the kinds of organisations that own UK homes, and some difficult implications for those who rent them.
