Literally _the_ reason to buy a home. In London, with rare exception, you don't get to live in a nice place unless you buy it. There are some luxury developme

Literally _the_ reason to buy a home. In London, with rare exception, you don't get to live in a nice place unless you buy it. There are some luxury developments with porters and whatnot for trust funders which are fitted well. (They're not necessarily unaffordable, but they're a waste; a labourer will save and buy instead). But generally, a privately rented flat is going to have multi-decade old everything, walls in the wrong place, crap carpets, bad or no storage, and just generally be suboptimal. Every flat I'd lived in as a renter I could have trivially made far better if I owned it. It's not a matter of permission; it's about ownership; no-one is spending five grand on doing up their landlord's kitchen; no-one's installing high end shelving or fitted wardrobes and taking them to the next place that's a different physical size in 8 months. Renting (as a majority thing rather than an option) is pernicious because it reduces investment in one's surroundings. It's not only internal stuff; you won't know your neighbours in six months, you don't care about the outside of the house or the lawn or whatever, etc.