What a monopoly actually is
A monopoly exists when a single seller controls supply of a product or service, faces no meaningful competition, and can therefore set prices above the competitive level without losing customers. The key feature is market power: the ability to raise prices without triggering a switch to an alternative.
Classic examples are utility networks. Scottish Water supplies water to every home in Scotland. There is no competing water provider you can switch to if you dislike their prices. That is a monopoly. Network Rail owns the rail infrastructure. If you want to run a train from Glasgow to Edinburgh, you have one option for track access. That is a monopoly. Utilities are structured this way for good economic reasons: when a single provider can supply an entire market more cheaply than two competing ones — because the fixed costs of infrastructure are so high that duplication would be wasteful — monopoly is the efficient outcome, and regulation substitutes for competition. Works in Progress has a good account of how this played out historically.
Now consider the Glasgow private rental market. There are thousands of individual landlords letting tens of thousands of properties across the city. The largest single operator controls a fraction of a percent of available stock. When a tenant is priced out by one landlord, they can and do approach dozens of others. There is no coordination, no price-fixing agreement, and no single entity capable of withholding supply. That is not a monopoly by any conventional definition — and none of the conditions that justify monopoly regulation apply.
How fragmented the market actually is
Scotland has 237,705 registered landlords. 76% own just one property. A further 12% own two. Landlords with three or more properties account for 12% of registrations but manage just over 1% of all private rented homes. The sector is structurally incapable of monopoly pricing: there are simply too many independent participants, each making their own decisions, for any form of coordinated market control.
The picture in England is the same. There are approximately 2.8 million private landlords, 45% of whom own just one rental property and 83% of whom own between one and four. The ten largest institutional landlords together account for fewer than 1% of all private rental homes. No landlord or group of landlords has the market power to set prices independently of competition.
Compare this with what economists call a highly concentrated market. The UK supermarket sector has four firms controlling roughly 70% of all grocery sales. Even that is not considered a monopoly — it is an oligopoly, and it still faces meaningful competition. The private rental market is far more fragmented than any sector that antitrust regulators would regard as concentrated.
Why this framing leads to the wrong policy conclusions
If landlords are a monopoly, the logical policy response is competition enforcement: breaking up large portfolios, caps on the number of properties any individual can own, anti-trust action against institutional investors. These are the remedies that follow from the diagnosis.
The problem is that the diagnosis is wrong. You cannot meaningfully break up 237,000 Scottish landlords, 76% of whom own a single property. There is nothing to break up. Anti-trust law exists to address dominant firms — and no such firm exists here. Portfolio caps would fall almost entirely on small individual landlords who already have no pricing power, while doing nothing to address the actual cause of high rents.
Propertymark reported that average available properties per letting agent branch in Scotland fell to historic lows in 2023 and 2024, while advertised rents on newly listed properties rose faster in Scotland than in England. The controlled market shrank; the uncontrolled margin of new lettings became more expensive.
Where we stand
The claim that landlords operate as a monopoly is wrong — and because it points toward the wrong solutions, it is actively harmful. Repeating the monopoly framing is a distraction that lets the actual cause of high rents off the hook. Rents are high because there are not enough homes. The solution is to build more of them.