If you’re a believer in the ‘When America sneezes’ cliché, here’s an interesting development from across the pond. Big corporations there are buying huge numbers of residential properties, making the family home an ‘institutional asset class’. This is much bigger than housing associations and what we might previously have called ‘professional landlords’, who perhaps own half a dozen properties via a limited company. The closest we’ve come to it so far is the subbing by universities of student flats and halls to the private sector. If you’ve recently had a student child, you’ll know that those companies generally don’t give a proverbial about the state of those properties. And my guess is that dealing, as a tenant, with a big corporate landlord will be a similarly depressing and frustrating experience. If, that is, we really do catch this particular US cold.
“John Lewis foray into BTR could result in losses of £57m”
I did predict a while ago that Waitrose Homes rather than Waitrose Home Deliveries could be the future. John Lewis were probably the most benign big business to decide to go into the housing rental market, a move which could swing things away from the unpredictability of the mass of private landlords who dominate the sector.
