Becoming a landlord : strategies of property-based welfare in the private rental sector in Great Britain
Abstract
Ongoing neoliberal policies have realigned the links between housing and welfare, positioning residential property investment––commonly through homeownership and exceptionally also through landlordism––at the core of households’ asset-building strategies. Nonetheless the private rented sector (PRS) has been commonly portrayed as a tenure option for tenants rather than a welfare strategy for landlords. Drawing on qualitative interviews with landlords across Great Britain, we explore landlords’ different motivations in engaging in landlordism; and the ways in which their property-based welfare strategies are shaped by the particular intersection of individual socioeconomic and life-course circumstances, and the broader socioeconomic and financial environment. By employing a constructionist grounded approach to research, our study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the different ways that asset-based welfare strategies operate within the PRS. We draw attention to an understudied nexus between homeownership and landlordism which we argue represents a promising route for future research.
Citation
Soaita , A M , Searle , B A , McKee , K & Moore , T 2017 , ' Becoming a landlord : strategies of property-based welfare in the private rental sector in Great Britain ' , Housing Studies , vol. 32 , no. 5 , pp. 613-637 . https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2016.1228855
Publication
Housing Studies
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0267-3037Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright 2016 Taylor & Francis. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at: https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2016.1228855
Description
This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust [grant number RP2011-IJ-024].Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.