Advertise a house to rent in Cornwall and you will get 30+ enquiries in 48 hours and have to suspend the listing before getting overwhelmed. A third of them will have always dreamed of moving to Cornwall. A desperate third want to overfill the house with adults to share costs and be able to just afford it. A sixth are "interesting". The remaining sixth of reasonable locals who can afford the rent will still leave you five times oversubscribed. The market is fundamentally broken here. You can't check a reference with an agent because they are all swamped. I don't know the answer. Possibly train and support a skilled building industry? But the rental yields on current house prices are 1-2%. Costs are rising. It's not getting better.