This book explores recent developments in private rental housing in the advanced economies since the turn of the century and especially since the global financial crisis (GFC). It does so through case studies of nine countries in all of which, to a greater or less extent, the private rental sector (PRS) has either grown, begun to change in fundamental ways or both. These countries are Australia, Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and the United States. Other advanced economies have experienced similar developments. As we shall see, the timing, pace and extent of these trends have varied between the nine countries in this book. But they are sufficiently pronounced and important in all of them that private rental housing is now receiving a level of attention in public debate and government policy that it has not experienced for many decades. And the same is true for academic research and scholarship on private renting: it is no exaggeration to say that private renting has become a ‘hot topic’ in academic debates in housing studies after many years on the backburner.

It seems unlikely that many observers in the late 20th century would have foreseen these new trajectories of change in private renting or the revival of interest in the sector that has subsequently occurred. That is hardly surprising. For many decades after 1945, private renting in many, but not all, of the advanced economies was a story of long-term decline (Harloe, 1985) and one from which few commentators expected it to recover. In some countries, including Britain and Spain, it was also a story of decay as rigid forms of rent control inhibited investment, not only in new private rental construction, but also in the refurbishment and repair of the existing stock of dwellings in the sector. After 1945, many advanced economies (AEs) introduced or expanded social rental housing provision; and in some it became an attractive alternative to private renting and thereby a competitor to private landlords (Harloe, 1995). Meanwhile, homeownership grew apace and eventually came to dominate housing provision in most of the AEs; and especially so in what Richard Ronald (2008) called the Anglo-Saxon ‘homeowner societies’.