The number of private landlords has exploded in recent years with the growth of the private rented sector. But in spite of this, there haven’t been many big studies dedicated to landlords and how they run their businesses.

To plug this gap and get some up-to-date data on landlords, we recently commissioned YouGov to carry out the biggest and most representative survey of them for five years. You can find the full results here, but here are a selection of the survey’s top findings about landlords.

Tenure

More than 40% of landlords are mortgage free, meaning they have no outstanding loan on any of the homes that they let out Only 6% of landlords rent themselves. This rises to 10% in London.

Professionalism

Almost 60% of landlords only let out one home, with the overwhelming majority (92%) letting out less than five. Not many are accredited or in a trade body. The small-scale nature may also help to explain why only 1 in 8 landlords are currently members of an accreditation scheme or trade body.

Barriers to access

Nearly two thirds of landlords don’t like to take people on housing benefit. 42% have an outright bar on benefit recipients, 21% occasionally let to them, but prefer not to. Almost half are less likely to rent to people they think are immigrants in the future. Over four in ten of those landlords that make letting decisions themselves (rather than via an agent) agreed that the ‘Right to Rent’ legislation would make them less likely to let to ‘people who appear to be/ I perceive to be immigrants’.

Good practice

Half of landlords are having regular electrical safety checks. This is in spite of the fact that only a tiny proportion are legally obliged to. Most landlords are open to the idea of offering longer tenancies. 31% said they would like to try longer tenancies and 33% are unsure, but would try them if they saw them working in practice.

These are only a few of the insights that our research on landlords have uncovered. The findings are an authoritative source of information for anyone who is interested in landlord business models and attitudes, something that anyone who wants to improve renting needs to know about. You can read it in full here.