Trust but verify

My brother, having worked in India for several years, recently came back to the UK to live in London. What he found there was that the only way he could rent an apartment was to pay for an entire year in advance as a deposit because, as he explained to me, he was considered as a risk to the landlord since he had no rental history. This all came as a surprise to me, because, when I left the UK shortly after completing university, the market was entirely dominated by private landlords who had no inkling of where their new tenants might have lived before. Although the rental market here in Poland is still dominated by individual landlords, some of whom buy apartments specifically for the future use of their still school-aged children, we are now seeing the Polish market becoming much more similar to that of the UK (institutionalised), with rental apartments being grouped together in portfolios of revenue generating assets. But landlords still feel the need to protect themselves from the r