The buy-to-let boom of recent years has its roots in a radical shake-up of the private rented sector by the Conservative government of the late 1980s, when legislation ended nearly 70 years of rent controls.

The 1988 Housing Act allowed for new lets to be priced purely by the market, building on gradual deregulation of the private rental market during the 1980s by approving the end of automatic security of tenure.