After the government’s well-publicized white paper on the housing and development industry, it has been found that a number of new factors are affecting the reasons why people choose to rent and why more of them are taking out longer leases. The survey, compiled and conducted by building and construction company McBains Cooper, discovered several important developments in the way that people think about renting at the current time.

For example the survey found that four in ten of those who were surveyed were found to be planning to take out longer leases lasting up to a total of ten years. It therefore shows that more and more people are thinking of living in rented accommodation for a great deal of their time on earth and this is undoubtedly partly due to the failure of private housing due to the astronomic fluctuations in the property market at this moment in time. Additionally, it has been shown through the survey results that 25 per cent feel that over 40 per cent of what they earn in work is what goes towards the rent, with a further 11 per cent of the opinion that more than 50 per cent of their income is devoted towards paying the rent. This is a huge amount of people and, with this figure expected to increase, it seems that living standards as a whole will decrease in this country as they become less and less affordable for those earning a low pay wage, despite the government’s apparent intension to raise the minimum wage.

It is also evident from the survey results that the majority of people were devoting their thoughts towards choosing homes based primarily on the size and facilities provided by the home itself rather than the local amenities and social opportunities in the surrounding area of the location. What this shows is that the world of our society is inevitably shrinking.