Responsible Parasites: The Ethics of Small-scale Property Investment in the UK

ABSTRACT

In UK public discourse, landlords count among the most unpopular figures. Their assumed immorality is often summarized in the image of the “parasite”. This paper draws on original ethnographic data from online communities for small-scale property investors who are also landlords, in order to explore what ethical ideas landlords themselves embrace. I argue that in the context of UK “asset-based welfare”, particularly the connection between pension provision and the property market, landlords can be seen to engage in ethical practices of “working on themselves” in order to become successful investor subjects. Next to techniques of affect management and the accumulation of “information capital”, this centrally involves eradicating in oneself ethical dispositions belonging to the waning paradigm of collectivized welfare and labour relations.

KEYWORDS:

• rental market
• property investment
• neoliberalism
• ethics
• risk
• asset-based welfare

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/16/landlords-social-parasites-last-people-should-be-honouring-buy-to-let, 6.4.2018

2. https://blog.shelter.org.uk/2015/07/exposing-the-property-parasites/

3. https://daniellatto.co.uk/tory-councillor-called-landlords-parasites/

4. View at: https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:19343701

5. As reported e.g. by the BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35110421

6. All data was in the public domain. No personally identifiable data was collected. Ethics approval was sought and obtained from the University of Oxford School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography Ethics Committee.

7. https://landlords.org.uk/news-campaigns/news/one-in-five-landlords-too-embarrassed-admit-it

8. “landlord” in the UK typically refers to anyone letting a property, whether they manage the letting themselves or use a third party, e.g. a letting agent.

9. “Right to Buy” involves selling council properties at a large discount, usually to sitting tenants. Almost three million publicly owned properties were sold in the UK since the 1970s (Kleinhans and Van Ham 2013) under Right to Buy. Scotland abolished the policy in 2016, while it remains active in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

10. Hulse, Reynolds, and Martin (2019) point out that in the Australian context, the “Everyman myth” of property investment – i.e. the accessibility of this model for anyone – is somewhat misleading, as most property owning households tend to be in higher income, age and wealth brackets. While the occupations named by the investors in this study are not all highly paid (e.g. NHS nurses typically earn between £ 20.000 and 40.000 per annum), some investors may be able to draw on family transfers or inherited wealth. Lower income investors face a relatively higher investment risk and may be less able to compensate for fluctuations in the property market.

11. All data presented in this paper was taken from the public domain, however, direct quotes have been minimally altered in order to make reverse-searching more difficult in the interest of anonymity.