No Monkey Business: Buy-to-let: bets with the housekeeping

The buy-to-let fashion has not increased the 10% of the UK housing stock accounted for by the privately-rented sector – only facilitated a shift in ownership to a lot of amateurs. They are running a business inside their household finances.
It’s now a bad business to be in, with prospects of negative cash flows (including financing costs) and virtually no long-term real growth to compensate. They are also likely to be the wrong people to be running it. Negative cash flows will severely hurt many middle-income households and threaten important savings goals. There is widespread ignorance of the true cash-flow variance, the magnitude of realistic expected returns and proper bases of comparison with other assets. This leads to sub-optimal long as well as short-run decisions.