Commentary on multiple property ownership

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Residential property, of course, can also be converted into commercial property (such as offices) and vice versa, in some cases even without conversion work being necessary; but that is beyond the scope of this paper.

2 Commercial property can also be used for more than one purpose simultaneously. For example, some shops have dwelling accommodation that comes with the property, which may be occupied by the owner (tenant, if the shop is let by a commercial property landlord) or let to another household.

3 Where owner-occupiers let all of their own home via Airbnb, they necessarily move elsewhere (e.g. to a friend, relative or partner’s home) for the duration of the guest’s stay.

4 It could be argued that describing Airbnb accommodation lettings as commercial property is bending the concept too far. But the different property asset classes – residential, commercial, industrial, office and warehouses – are defined primarily by the uses to which they are put (and not just or necessarily by their built form). Hotels are commercial property and Airbnb lettings are functionally equivalent to hotels, even if they are only intermittently let on that platform. And nor is this the only example of property being used temporarily in another asset class from their primary one. For example, at the time of writing there is a pop-up café in unlet open-plan office space around the corner from where I work.

5 It is far easier to survey a representative sample of private tenants within a survey of all households than it is of their landlords. A series of surveys of private landlords undertaken in England has until the latest one been based on asking private tenants for the contact details of their landlord or managing agent; and then conducting interviews with the named landlord or managing agent. This approach makes it possible to survey corporate landlords and not just private individual ones. Mandatory landlord registers can also provide a sampling frame for interviewing representative samples of all landlords and not just private individual ones. The most recent survey of private landlords in Scotland used the mandatory landlord register as a sampling frame (Crook et al., 2009).

6 See Scanlon (2011) for data on the share of private rental dwellings owned by private individuals, institutions and other types of landlord in 15 countries.