It was bound to happen. The backlash, that is. Well, if your most celebrated role model is still Mr Rachman, what hope is there that you will ever enjoy widespread approval? Add into the mix the image of winsome first-time buyers, all doing a sad-clown look, and you will understand why we landladies are up there with journalists and estate agents on the Most Hated chart. If I only had a Saturday job at Foxtons, I could score an unpopularity hat-trick, and would never be invited to dinner parties again.

The trouble is, it is all based on the easy stereotype of the rapacious buy-to-let investor, greedily slavering, with visions of never-ending capital gain built on a perilous pyramid of properties funded on 95% mortgages. Speculators all, whose lust for capital has pushed the price of property so high that many 30-year-olds across Britain are still living with their parents.

Well, I hate to stamp on such a glorious caricature, but here are a few reasons why I still manage to sleep at night, even though I am reasonably well acquainted with the assured shorthold tenancy agreement.

Surprisingly enough, the actual amount of property in the private rental sector has not increased all that much since the buy-to-let boom began a decade or so ago. Ownership may have moved from the big corporate landlord to the private investor, but the level of rented property in the UK remains at 11%.

BACKGROUND

• Tales of a landlady: Tax reforms

• Into the sunset

BACKGROUND

• Tales of a landlady: Degrees of success

• Tales of a landlady: It pays to shop around

• Tales of a landlady: Residents only

• The ties that bind

• How low can you go?

BACKGROUND

• Tales of a landlady: Avoiding the agents

• Tales of a landlady: In the dock

• Tales of a landlady: the age of reason

• Tales of a landlady: Heroes and villains

• Tales of a landlady: High maintenance

BACKGROUND

• Back to the ’burbs

• A waste of energy?

• Tenants like gardens, but not tending them

• In the doghouse

• Parking mad

It’s eviction time

Can investors profit from the rise in repossessions?

• It’s eviction time

BACKGROUND

• Do property workshops work?

• A letting gamble

• Spread betting

• When buy-to-let turns from a hobby into a living

Tales of a landlady: Persistent complaint

How can lettings agents justify annual renewal fees, asks Rosie Millard

BACKGROUND

• Landlords: halo or horns?

• Bidding wars

• Time to quit the ring?

Indeed, you have to go back to 1989 to find a significant dip, as Malcolm Harrison of the Association of Rental Lettings Agents points out. “In the ‘rush to buy’ era, when Mrs Thatcher promoted starter homes and the selling of council houses, the amount of rented property was 7%,” he says. “A few years later, it rose to 11%, where it has stayed ever since.”

Why did private ownership of rented property take off in the first place? One of the reasons investors became interested in bricks and mortar following the 1996 Housing Act (which ushered in the phenomenon of the buy-to-let mortgage) was that more traditional ways of investing had gone down the pan. Remember Equitable Life? As a result of its collapse, people became suspicious of pensions, of stocks, of bonds, of airy-fairy abstract concepts managed or, shall we say, mismanaged by the pinstriped brigade in the City.

With companies pulling the plug on final-salary schemes, thousands saw the advent of the buy-to-let mortgage as a chance to take command of their financial destiny. The arrival of the private investor in the world of rented property is as much about misdemeanours in the Square Mile as anything else.

And what about the tenants? Undoubtedly, some are people anxious to get onto the property ladder. Many are also students. Plus ça change.

What has changed, however, is that a third group has emerged: professional tenants who choose to rent because it suits their working practices. Flexibility, hot-desking, travel — along with giant bonuses, these elements are a reality of modern employment, and suit the employee who rents. My tenants have always earned more than I do. Much more. They are classic City employees who cannot be bothered to buy a house. Big blue-chip companies want a workforce that can be herded around the world, one for whom domesticity is a Victorian, and deeply unfashionable, concept — and they are happy to comply.

You might not like it, but that’s life. Of course, my tenants will probably all end up buying some huge pile in Oxfordshire, but for the moment, they are happy renting. The oven in one of my buy-to-let flats still has its operating manual sitting tidily inside it, because it has never been switched on. The flat is seven years old.

Connected with the voguishness of renting is the novel concept that living in the inner city is cool. When I was growing up, everyone aspired towards a suburban lifestyle. Now city centres have become trendy places to live, reclaimed by an incoming tide of well-heeled young tenants.

Indeed, buy-to-let is one of the key reasons for the steady regeneration of city centres across Britain. Brownfield sites from Newcastle to Liverpool, Plymouth to Birmingham, have been seized by developers, who put up shiny apartment blocks, then flog them to investors, who, in turn, rent them out to tenants who would no more dream of owning a terraced house in the suburbs than they would crochet a jumper.

And, once the tenants are in, then Starbucks, Borders, train stations, night buses, restaurants and all the rest come charging in after them.

Result: a significant uplift in quality for everyone. Frankly, everyone who enjoys using a city centre at night should offer up a small prayer of thanks to the buy-to-let brigade. I like to think of us as pioneers, helping to make urban existence acceptable once more.

I could go on — about how buy-to-let has stabilised a fluctuating market, about how it helps people achieve their goals — but I don’t want to get all Field of Dreams about it. You know this column offers nothing but sage wisdom. And that’s another thing. We landladies might be despised, but at least we have a good head for figures.

Times recommends

• Second homes: credit crunch casualty or money-spinner?
• How I built my own sliding house
• Top 10 incentives for house buyers