Whaaat? Less supply pushes up prices?

Say it ain’t so!

Average private rents in Great Britain have climbed to record highs, with the amount tenants are being asked to pay in some hotspots rising more than 25% in a year, data shows.

Our word.

Rightmove also said conditions for landlords were challenging. It indicated that last autumn’s rise in stamp duty , as well as speculation about more tax changes in next month’s budget and the impact of the government’s renters’ rights bill, may be prompting some buy-to-let landlords to bail out and may be putting off others from investing in the sector.

The returns to being a landlord are being deliberately managed down. There are, therefore, fewer landlords - not as a happenstance, it is deliberate public policy that there be fewer landlords. Fewer landlords means a lower supply of rentals, therefore rentals cost more.

That’s the sort of chain of logic people could build a theory upon you know. We look forward to someone having a crack at it too. You know, just as an intellectual exercise that might be able to inform public policy?

For that insistence that supply and demand just don’t work with housing, rentals or landlords just doesn’t seem to be panning out, does it?

Tim Worstall