Buy-to-let landlords in the UK enjoyed a wonderful boom from the late 1990s up until just before the financial crisis (and beyond in some areas). The British have long been partial to property as an asset class. But the huge, leveraged gains seen in the heady days leading up to the 2008 crash, with soaring house prices fuelled by low interest rates, really cemented the view that "you can't go wrong with bricks'n'mortar".
But recently, life has been getting harder for buy-to-let investors. House prices were already at unaffordable levels when the 2008 crisis hit. Prices slid in the immediate aftermath, but with the Bank of England slashing interest rates to near-0% and printing money (via quantitative easing) they didn't stay low for long. Meanwhile, the electoral calculus began to shift. Those who felt shut out of the housing market or feared that their children would be started to outnumber those who saw ever-increasing house prices as only a good thing. And landlords snapping up houses that would otherwise have gone to first-time buyers were an obvious target for their irritation.
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