Buy-to-let. Where did it all begin? For me, with a torn-out newspaper advert and a cautious hard-hat tour around a building site. Back in 1999, it was the same for hundreds of other pioneers. Buy-to-let was an investment strategy whose main attraction was that it was easy.

What’s not to understand about bricks and mortar? It was simple: property was cheap, interest rates low and, thanks to cultural influences ranging from Sex and the City to the Manhattan Loft Corporation, a brave new world was born, full of energetic renters not afraid to try out life in an urban block. Putative landlords discovered that a bespoke buy-to-let financial arrangement had conveniently been invented for them, one that loaned money according to expected rents rather than actual income.

Building sites slowly became actual flats and houses, tenants arrived, the rent came in and capital values started to rise. Buy-to-let was suddenly the smartest thing to have one’s money in. It was an invention born at precisely the right time, when property was on the up, while more traditional pensions were going very much the other way. Lenders were happy to play ball and new investors poured in – particularly people like me, for whom the mere mention of stocks, bonds and gilts caused pure white noise.

The ripple became a wave. Landlords wanted to club together, partly to moan about snagging issues, partly to find out how everyone else was coping, and partly to brag about how smart they all were – at dinner parties, naturally, but also in more formal groups: clubs, rental associations and syndications of landlords were born. Naturally, the media was swift to follow. In particular, the new Home section of The Sunday Times invited me to write this column. My first commission, back in 2001, was for four weeks. Then it just went on, week after week. People couldn’t understand how this story seemed to keep on running.

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?

It was an intriguing tale with any number of different angles and a definite feelgood factor. With property values on a seemingly unstoppable upward curve and Britain enjoying an economic boom, buy-to-let was a get-rich-quick scheme that actually did what it said on the packet.

Plus, it had a catchy title. The term “buy-to-let” was apparently dreamt up by the Association of Residential Letting Agents (ARLA) at the inaugural press launch of the buy-to-let mortgage in 1996; a “hallelujah moment”, according to one of the speakers present. The phrase has since spawned offspring: build-to-let, let-to-buy, and its overseas sibling, fly-to-let.

It was also a national story, one that the entire country seemed to have taken to its heart, and from which hundreds of people benefited. Buy-to-let landlords popped up everywhere. This column has included regular contributions from landlords in Bristol, Southampton, the West Midlands, Sheffield, Manchester, Aberdeen, central London and Cornwall. It has featured everyone from cautious investors with just one property to landlords such as Fergus and Judith Wilson, former schoolteachers whose empire comprises about 650 properties in Kent.

By the middle of last year, about 750,000 buy-to-let mortgages were outstanding, with a total value of £84 billion. ARLA estimates there are now 800,000 landlords in this country. Well past its first teenage flush, buy-to-let is considered a mature, even rather matronly, figure on the financial landscape.

The nature of the phenomenon is changing, too. Giant conglomerates are picking up smaller portfolios, and many investors who first flirted with it have decided to leave the market. Having made their money, they are quitting while they are ahead – although, I hope, not before the changes to capital-gains tax due in April, which will allow people to keep a greater share of their profits.

Equally, although there has not been a country-wide fall in property prices, they are levelling out. Anyone starting out as a buy-to-letter now will struggle to pay their mortgage with the rent, and many landlords have stopped adding to their portfolios. The quick buck once promised has been replaced by the necessity to take a long-term view. Meanwhile, in some urban centres, supply has reached saturation level: Leeds is estimated to have 5,000 too many student flats. Investors have complained of similar problems in Liverpool and Manchester.

Yet analysts have predicted that the private rental sector, which accounts for 11% of all housing stock, needs to expand to 15% in the next decade, to cope with demand. In July, the government itself announced a plan to build 3m new homes by 2020.

When these properties arrive, as Gordon Brown has promised, it is likely prices will still be beyond many. Britain, traditionally a country of property ownership, will have to accommodate a flexible workforce and growing rental market, and the private buy-to-let sector may find itself having to perform where public housing once reigned supreme. Something invented as an investment vehicle could become a player of vital social importance. This is my farewell column, but it is not goodbye to buy-to-let – far from it.

buytolet@sunday-times.co.uk

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