This section explores the impact of private renting on health and wellbeing. Responsibilities and challenges can affect landlords’ sense of pride and levels of stress, testing resilience as well as bringing rewards. The quality, security and affordability of the property tenants rent, and whether it feels like home, impact their physical and emotional wellbeing.
While they primarily view their role in professional or business terms, many landlords also have an emotional engagement with their tenants and properties, taking the role beyond a transactional arrangement. Being a housing provider, as some prefer to call it, can be a source of pride and satisfaction in offering tenants well maintained, safe, clean, and stable homes, especially for families and vulnerable individuals. They gain pleasure and a sense of fulfilment from seeing tenants thrive and children grow up in secure environments.
However, many feel they lack respect and recognition for their contribution to community wellbeing, especially when they go beyond their legal obligations to support tenants emotionally and practically. They often feel stigmatised, with their motivations and level of personal gain misrepresented, unfairly stereotyped as ‘greedy’ or ‘slum landlords’. This can undermine the pride they feel and bring discomfort in publicly identifying as landlords.
Several have experienced stress and anxiety when dealing with rent arrears, property damage, chaotic or criminal behaviour, and evictions, with a few having sleepless nights.
The stress comes from the situation itself, including the unpleasant, and sometimes criminal or disturbed behaviour of tenants, but also the frustration of hitting legal and systematic barriers to resolving issues. Many landlords struggle with having to make decisions affecting tenants’ lives, including raising rents, serving eviction notices, or selling a property. They may empathise with tenants and decisions can sometimes involve a struggle between personal values, being business-minded, and wanting to avoid causing hardship.
Landlords with larger portfolios and other jobs can find the workload a strain. However, none felt being a landlord seriously affected their health and wellbeing negatively, and some saw no real impact at all. Those worn down by their experience adjusted business models and others pointed to resilience gained through careers in the police, health, social care, or frontline housing. Husband-and-wife teams provide mutual support, while the experience of supporting family or friends through similar circumstances to those faced by tenants helped them cope. They also look to peers and sector support through the National Resident Landlords Association or the Eastern Landlords Association.
Most recognised positive impacts on their wellbeing, usually through improved financial security, particularly in retirement.
Being a landlord helped some remain active and pursue their own interests. Good relationships with tenants brought satisfaction, however, some also acknowledged the emotional toll of being drawn into tenants’ personal lives. Landlords often feel like informal social workers and maintaining professional boundaries can be challenging.
Tenants described a wide range of lived experiences in private rented housing. At one end of the scale, participants were happy where they live, find the rent relatively affordable, have repairs done in good time and enjoy good relations with their landlords. They feel a sense of control, can personalise the property, and report positive impacts on their wellbeing.
At the other end of the scale, tenants feel looked down on by landlords and agents, often experiencing barriers to renting in the first place. They struggled with damp and mould, inadequate heating, pest infestations, rotting floorboards, and broken doors and windows. Tenants felt insecure, fearing eviction or rent increases if they complain. Stress, anxiety, and depression related to living conditions might be accompanied by physical difficulties such as respiratory problems, while existing health conditions are exacerbated.
Most tenants’ experiences fall somewhere between these extremes. How they feel about where they live, and how it affects their wellbeing, depends on several, interrelated factors. It begins with their housing journey. Like the input into a mixing desk, these previous experiences and the feelings of wellbeing they generate, are balanced by satisfaction with other factors – property characteristics and condition, relationships, affordability, security, and the sense of home and identity.
Finding the ideal property type, in the right location, that helps a tenant live the life they aspire to, can improve well-being. However, one tenant found their isolated rural cottage with original features idyllic in summer but unliveable in winter, prompting a move elsewhere.
An older tenant, satisfied with their home, had an exceptional relationship with a kind and thoughtful landlord whose son took over when he died. The tenant was awoken by the new landlord banging on the doors and windows to announce himself while the tenant was in bed unwell. Their anxiety was exacerbated by poor communication about the rent owed.
Sudden changes to how one tenant felt about their property’s condition prompted a move from the place they had made home. Replacement of a kitchen cupboard led to the discovery of serious mould on a wall, making sense of recent respiratory difficulties. Anxiety was heightened when the contractor recommended damp-proofing and the landlord insisted the mould should simply be washed down. The family moved as soon as possible.
A property can feel like home until a sharp rent increase threatens its affordability. New landlords of an HMO linked a significant rent increase to improvements that were needed due to the building’s previous neglect. The tenant became concerned about the affordability of the property, compounding the depression they already lived with.
A tenancy can suddenly feel more insecure, even without an eviction notice. One tenant felt relatively settled in the house they were renting after moving multiple times throughout their housing journey. However, finding out that their landlords were divorcing and thinking the property might be sold reduced the level of security they felt.
Living somewhere that feels like home and supports a sense of identity is associated with wellbeing. One tenant described a deep emotional connection to their current home and how the progressive nature of their neurological condition threatens this sense of belonging and of self – a feeling that perhaps stopped them from seriously pursing alternatives.
A tenant with a history of forced relocations lives with their family in a well-maintained property that meets their practical needs, in a neighbourhood they like. However, their frustrated aspiration of homeownership to provide security for their children generates feelings of guilt and anxiety. Despite satisfaction with other factors, housing situations still impact wellbeing when they conflict with identity and ambition.
Safe Suffolk Renters was one of nine national Pathfinder projects funded by the UK government between April 2023 and March 2025.
Our research collected more detailed information on key themes which are illustrated with case studies.
