9
Resolution Foundation | Game of Homes
The rise of multiple property ownership in Great Britain
households repeatedly through
time. The highest-quality data on
wealth in Great Britain is the WAS,
which has been carried out every
two years since 2006-08. Its main
advantages are its granularity – it
gives a fine level of detail about
households’ wealth holdings and
many other characteristics – and its
comprehensive coverage of national
wealth including a strategy of over-
sampling the wealthiest households.
We use the BHPS to extend trends
from the WAS back in time to 1993.
Lastly, a small part of our analysis
looks at the amount of money that
people in England aged over 50
expect to leave as bequests. Here
we use data from the ELSA.
• The Family Resources Survey, which
we use to extend our analysis of the
importance of rents for household
incomes back in time from 2006-08
and forward from 2014-16.
• The 2011 UK Census included a
question on people’s ownership of
second homes, which we compare
with other data on second home
ownership.
• Council Tax Records. We can use
council tax data collected by the
Ministry of Housing, Communities
and Local Government to measure
the number of second homes in
England and Wales, as well as the
[11] The English Private Landlord Survey suggests that 39 per cent of landlords had no mortgage at all in 2018, while 55 per
cent had a buy-to-let mortgage. See: MHCLG, English Private Landlord Survey 2018, January 2019
proportion of them that receive
council tax discounts.
• The English Private Landlord
Survey. This government survey,
last carried out in 2018, gives a
detailed and comprehensive picture
of the private-rented sector in
England and the characteristics and
motives of private landlords. As
discussed above, it does not exactly
reproduce the estimates for the
number of landlords obtained from
the Wealth and Assets Survey, but
other aspects of its data make it an
invaluable resource.
• UK Finance data. Data from the
mortgage industry on lending for
additional property purchases gives
us a timely picture of the impacts of
recent policy changes.
We aim where possible to use the WAS
to measure additional property wealth,
as this is the most detailed survey
and the one with the largest sample
and most comprehensive coverage
of private wealth. We recognise
that in some respects it differs from
other surveys – for example it does
not capture household incomes as
comprehensively as the FRS, nor does
it allow us to count the number of
mortgages held on additional property
as effectively as financial services
industry data.
Buy-to-let is clearly therefore both the largest component of the stock of additional
properties, and the fastest-growing part. Another way to measure its growth is to look
at data on the volume of buy-to-let mortgages issued by lenders (although this is an
incomplete measure given not all BTL owners take out mortgages).
[11]
Figure 4 plots this
data on an annual basis since 2000. The purple line shows a steady (and staggering) rise