I am all for big businesses moving into buy to rent. There are far too many amatuer landlords in the UK making a living by renting out poor quality housing.

My office landlord also has two small flats above (think glorified bedsits) and his partner also rents out a tiny cottage. This is their living (aprox. £3k a month), neither works or has any other business, all from a 'portfolio' of properties that maybe cost £150k twelve to fifteen years ago.

As an example of market inefficiency, multiply this across the country and it's not hard to argue that the housing market is severely broken.

A lot of comments in this thread about corporate buy-to-let seem reasonable, but only under the nihilistic assumption that prices cannot fall and home ownership must be perennially out of reach for the median earner.

What about instead of shifting from private parasitic landlords to corporate parasitic landlords, we just let people buy the homes they live in (by enacting one of many possible policies to limit the profitability of BTL and thus reduce competition for homebuyers)?

It just doesn't seem to make any sense to try and apply free market principles to housing. There's absolutely no benefit.

If we wouldn’t have a centrally planned monetary system that is trying to avoid deflation at all cost, I would agree with you. So for now, it seems that assets won’t be allowed to go down because it would blow up the debt based system that we have built. Central planning begets more central planning.

I too have no issues with large business getting involved with rentals. As long as it is clear for everyone involved that housing should be low margin business. That is very low, but relatively safe returns and mostly not from appreciation of assets.