My guess here is that in part to how common renting has traditionally been in the UK (pre WWI , something like 9/10 homes were rented, this greatly declined to

My guess here is that in part to how common renting has traditionally been in the UK (pre WWI , something like 9/10 homes were rented, this greatly declined to ~7% until rising again since the nineties). More than a few big UK landlords have been around for centuries.