Tenants and small landlords are not natural enemies.

Congratulations. You fell for it.

If the reaction to my Social Media Posts demonstrated anything, it is that the system remains remarkably effective at doing exactly what it was designed to do. With impressive efficiency, it split the country into familiar, warring camps: landlords versus tenants, rich versus poor, parasites versus victims. The lines were drawn, the moral positions assumed, and the arguments duly rehearsed.

This, in practice, is what divide and conquer looks like.

Because while public attention is absorbed by online skirmishes, something far more consequential is unfolding with very little scrutiny. The fury directed at small, individual landlords has created the perfect distraction from a much larger structural shift taking place beneath the surface of the housing market.

“Ron and Marge”, the archetypal couple with two rental properties purchased over decades of work and saving, have become convenient symbols of everything that is supposedly wrong with the system. They are accused of hoarding, profiteering, and moral failure. They are presented as the villains in a housing crisis they did not create.

They are not, in fact, the problem.

“Ron and Marge” are not draining the state…

Nor are they engaged in some predatory scheme. They are ordinary people who responded rationally to the incentives and warnings of successive governments: that the pension system was unreliable, that personal provision was essential, and that property represented security in an increasingly uncertain economy.

While public anger is channelled towards people like them, institutional investors, international conglomerates, and pension funds are acquiring housing stock at scale. Not two properties, but thousands. Entire developments. Whole neighbourhoods.

This transfer is not loud or theatrical. It does not trend on social media. It happens through transactions, balance sheets, and long-term capital strategies. By the time it becomes visible, it is usually irreversible.

It is worth stating plainly what is so often overlooked. Most tenants would be better off renting from Ron and Marge than from an asset management firm operating at arm’s length from the communities in which it owns homes.

Individual landlords can exercise discretion.

They can listen, adapt, and make judgments based on human circumstances. An institution cannot do this in any meaningful sense. Its obligations are contractual and fiduciary, not relational. Decisions are shaped by policy, not empathy, and exceptions are liabilities rather than virtues.

Calls to eliminate small landlords often ignore where housing ownership flows once those landlords exit the market. Properties do not disappear. Demand does not evaporate. Instead, homes are consolidated into larger portfolios, increasingly controlled by organisations whose primary duty is to maximise yield for distant investors.

This concentration of ownership should concern anyone serious about affordability, stability, or social cohesion. History offers little comfort when essential goods become dominated by a small number of powerful actors. Choice diminishes, prices harden, and accountability becomes abstract.

The prevailing narrative, however, remains stubbornly simplistic. Housing debates are reduced to moral binaries that generate heat but little clarity. Landlords are cast as inherently exploitative, tenants as inherently virtuous. Structural failures are personalised, and systemic incentives are ignored.

Outrage, after all, is politically useful. It mobilises emotion, fragments solidarity, and keeps attention focused laterally rather than vertically.

Over the past decade, regulatory and tax pressures have steadily increased on small landlords. Each measure is often defensible in isolation, but together they form an environment that many individuals find unsustainable. Those without scale, legal teams, or access to cheap capital are the first to leave.

The question is not whether landlords should be regulated. They should be. The question is who regulation ultimately advantages. In practice, complexity and compliance favour large institutions far more than individuals.

At the heart of the housing crisis lies a basic arithmetic problem. There are not enough homes.

This is not resolved by reallocating blame or by shrinking the pool of people willing to provide rental accommodation. Fewer landlords do not mean lower rents. They mean fewer options, greater concentration, and more power in fewer hands.

Most landlords are not property magnates

They are participants in a system that increasingly requires individuals to secure their own financial futures. They took risks, delayed consumption, and invested in an asset class long promoted as prudent and responsible.

At the same time, institutional ownership is frequently framed as more professional or efficient. These terms deserve scrutiny. Professional for whom? Efficient to what end?

Efficiency in this context often means treating housing purely as a financial instrument. Homes become units of yield, detached from place, community, and long-term stewardship. Decisions are optimised for return, not resilience.

None of this is an argument against tenants, who largely want what most people want: security, fairness, and a decent place to live. Nor is it an argument against reform. The current system is failing too many people to defend complacently.

What it is, however, is a warning against allowing a false conflict to obscure a genuine and accelerating shift in ownership.

Tenants and small landlords are not natural enemies. In many respects, their interests align more closely than either group’s interests align with those of global capital.

There is still time to change course. But that window is narrowing.

If housing continues to be fully financialised, control will not easily return to local hands. Once ownership is consolidated, it is rarely unwound. Communities do not regain leverage simply by recognising the mistake after the fact.

A functional housing system requires more supply, not less

More builders, not fewer. More responsible owners willing to commit capital and time to long-term provision.

It requires more net contributors to the system, not policies that inadvertently expel them.

If the aim is to stabilise rents, protect tenants, and preserve mixed communities, then attention must shift from scapegoats to structures.

The alternative is to continue applauding the spectacle while the substance quietly changes hands.

The system would prefer that debate remain fixed on Ron and Marge. It is far less comfortable when the conversation turns to who is actually accumulating the nation’s housing stock, and to what end.