Market signals and disrepair in privately rented housing

A. D. H. Crook and J. E. T. Hughes

Journal of Property Research, 2001, vol. 18, issue 1, 21-50

Abstract: Despite recent improvements, private rented housing in England is in a worse state of repair than dwellings in other tenures. This has been attributed to a number of factors, including rent control and regulation, tax and subsidy policy, and falling effective demand. In the post-war period governments tried to achieve improvements by several means, including grant aid, enforcing standards, and transferring dwellings to the social rented sector. Since 1988 government policy has been designed to revive private rented housing and rents have been deregulated. Government policy makes it clear that landlords are primarily responsible for undertaking repairs and maintaining standards. It is assumed that market rents will provide sufficient incentives for landlords to carry out maintenance and do improvements. The evidence presented in this paper shows, however, that market rents are not strongly related to the state of repair of dwellings in the deregulated sector and also that the dwellings in the poorest condition are owned by landlords primarily seeking a commercial return on their investments. This suggests that conditions are not likely to improve under the current policy framework which seeks to increase the proportion of dwellings owned by investment oriented landlords, so long as market rents are not related to the state of repair of private rented dwellings.

Date: 2001
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09599910010014129 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jpropr:v:18:y:2001:i:1:p:21-50

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RJPR20

DOI: 10.1080/09599910010014129

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Property Research is currently edited by Bryan MacGregor

More articles in Journal of Property Research from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().