“I bought this house at £50,000,” says James Coupland as Darude’s Eurodance classic, “Sandstorm,” plays loudly in the background, “and I spent £30,000 on the refurb.” Coupland is showing us around his latest “buy-to-let” property, a standard-looking terraced house of the kind you’ll find more or less anywhere in Britain, now outfitted with the gray crushed velvet and cheap chrome fixtures of the international Airbnb aesthetic. It looks more like an airport lounge than an actual home. After converting the property from a two-bedroom, single-occupancy building into a three-bedroom “house in multiple occupancy” (or HMO, in the parlance of the property market), he says the house will net him £21,060 a year in rental income, a staggering return on his initial investment.

At the time of writing, Coupland’s video has been viewed 3.7 million times on TikTok alone, a platform where he boasts nearly seven hundred thousand followers. He’s far from alone. In a similar video, Abi Hookway, a “property expert” and “entrepreneur” who regularly brags about her £8 million property portfolio, stands in front of a smart board while promising to teach how you, too, can retire early — all it takes is owning and renting six properties. “You don’t need to work,” Hookway tells us. “You’ve got your properties working for you.”

Since the pandemic, thousands of such videos have flooded social media feeds: men with improbably white teeth and women in stiletto heels zipping around homes in towns and cities, extolling the virtues of being a landlord. What they all share — aside from a fondness for bad wall art — is a gospel of property as easy money and a get-rich-quick mindset per-fectly in sync with Britain’s twenty-first-century economy of asset inflation and precarity.