In June 1604, Pope Clement VIII issued a papal bull protecting the Jewish residents of Rome's ghetto from their Christian landlords. The Jews were legally forbidden from owning property, so they had no choice but to rent, and landlords charged whatever they wanted. Rents had risen, one contemporary account noted, "out of all proportion with those in other quarters of the city." Per Cornell Law School, Evictions were routine.
Clement's bull froze the rents. It prohibited evictions without cause. The first recorded tenant protection law in a major Western city.
That was 421 years ago. The argument hasn't changed. Neither has what happens next.
Housing gets expensive. Tenants get squeezed. A law passes. The law closes some loophole landlords were exploiting. Landlords screen harder. The most vulnerable renters end up worse off. Then the financial industry builds a product to fill the gap. The product becomes a market.
Rinse. Repeat.
Glasgow, 1915. Mrs. Barbour's Army Changes Everything.
Before WWI, Britain had no meaningful tenant protections. Landlords set rents at whatever the market would bear, evicted anyone they felt like, and faced essentially zero legal accountability.
Then the war happened. Men shipped to the front. Families left behind in already-overcrowded cities. Landlords raised rents and evicted tenants who couldn't keep up.
Glasgow's tenants went on strike. An estimated 25,000 of them. Women organized most of it. Mary Barbour ran an anti-eviction militia out of her tenement block, supporters physically blocking sheriff's officers at the door. The newspapers called them "Mrs. Barbour's Army."
It worked. In November 1915, the Rents and Mortgage Interest (War Restrictions) Bill became law. Substack Rents frozen. Evictions restricted. Russia, Germany, Italy, and almost every other country involved in World War I followed suit. Wealth Management Twelve months. That's how fast a local rent strike in a Scottish city became the global template.
New York, 1920. The Idea Takes Root in America.
The US federal government handled its wartime housing crisis through arbitration committees with no legal authority. Shaming landlords into decency. It mostly didn't work.
New York was different. By 1920, the city's vacancy rate had collapsed below 1%. Rent strikes spread through Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan. Courts clogged.
The state legislature, controlled by Republicans who historically favored property owners, passed a rent-control program anyway, to keep costs down and limit baseless evictions. MIT News No oversight board. Enforcement left to fifty municipal court judges with wildly different sympathies. Messy. But it planted something: in New York, tenants had legal rights. That concept was revived during World War II and has persisted ever since, evolving into the rent stabilization system that exists today. MIT News
Europe, 1945 Onward. Emergency Hardens Into Law.
Most countries that had introduced wartime rent controls simply never withdrew them. World War II simply aggravated the housing shortage. Cairn.info Germany wove tenant protections into its civil code. France's 1948 housing law made them a permanent legal right. Vienna went furthest: 220,000 apartments owned outright by the city, around 200,000 cooperative flats built with public subsidies, under a law that forbids selling them at market price. OpenEdition Housing as infrastructure.
New York, 1969 to 2019. Fifty Years of Plugging the Same Leak.
New York's current framework wasn't designed. It accumulated through decades of political conflict, each generation inheriting the structural problems the last one left behind.
The Rent Stabilization Law of 1969 brought 325,000 apartments under regulation. The Emergency Tenant Protection Act of 1974 reversed a disastrous experiment that let landlords reset rents to market rate on vacancy, predictably triggering a wave of tenant harassment. The 80s and 90s brought steady erosion: decontrol thresholds, preferential rent loopholes, "Frankensteining" where landlords merged regulated and unregulated units to escape stabilization. Each loophole got closed, usually years late. New ones appeared.
2019 was the biggest intervention in decades. HSTPA eliminated vacancy decontrol, capped renovation-linked rent increases, and banned prepaid rent. The practice of requiring "first and last months' rent" was prohibited. The law's language covers "advances" as well as deposits, closing the workaround explicitly. New York State Bar Association
Before 2019, landlords had a release valve. Tenant looks risky on paper? Pay six months upfront. Extractive, often predatory, but it functioned: landlords took on tenants they'd otherwise reject, and those tenants got housing.
HSTPA closed that valve. Landlords tightened their screening criteria and started declining applicants they would have approved before. Aptsofny The tenants the law was designed to protect got squeezed out through a different door.
But Isn't Deregulation the Answer?
Here's the fair counterargument. Maybe the economists who oppose tenant protection laws are right. Rent control does reduce supply. Tighter eviction rules do make landlords pickier. There's real evidence for both, and ignoring it isn't serious analysis.
But when you remove tenant protections, what fills the vacuum isn't a benevolent free market. Thatcher proved it.
In 1988, her government abolished the rent controls in place since Glasgow's rent strikers won them in 1915. The theory: deregulation would grow the private rental sector through market competition. At the time, the private rented sector accounted for less than 8% of homes in Britain, down from 76% in 1918. Wikipedia Set the market free and supply would follow demand.
It didn't. In Q4 2024, 26% of UK landlords sold at least one property, the highest exit rate ever recorded, while only 8% bought. Consumerintelligence Average private rents increased 8.6% in the year to July 2024. By 2025, England had passed the strongest tenant protection law in its history. Thirty-seven years of deregulation produced the conditions that made the Renters' Rights Act politically inevitable.
Removing tenant protections doesn't fix housing markets. It moves the crisis around until the pressure builds again.
Which brings us to the market the crisis built.
The Billion-Dollar Gap
Institutional lease guarantors existed before 2019. A company backs your lease, the landlord gets paid if you default, you pay the company a fee. It was niche. A workaround for edge cases.
After HSTPA, it stopped being niche.
The owners of hundreds of thousands of New York City apartments now accept institutional guarantors, up from just a few thousand 16 years ago. The industry grew especially fast after the 2019 law limited security deposits. Gothamist Landlords lost a financial buffer and needed a replacement. The insurance market built one.
Insurent is now accepted at over 775,000 apartments across more than 8,000 buildings. Insurent TheGuarantors covers approximately 700,000 New York City apartments and 2.3 million units nationwide. Gothamist The US institutional guarantor market is projected to reach $1.5 billion by 2032. Tenant pays roughly one month's rent annually. Landlord gets coverage from a regulated carrier. Renter without a Tri-State co-signer gets the apartment.
The law removed a mechanism. Insurance replaced it.
England, 2025. Thatcher's Experiment Ends.
The UK's Renters' Rights Act 2025 is the biggest reform to the private rented sector since the late 1980s. House of Commons Library The Act bans advance rent before a tenancy begins, even if the tenant offers it voluntarily. Pinsent Masons Section 21 no-fault evictions end in May 2026. Wikipedia Blanket rejections of tenants on benefits or with children are now discrimination under law.
The global rent guarantee insurance market hit $3.1 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $5.8 billion by 2033. Growthmarketreports Europe leads. The regulatory conditions now match what made New York's market take off after 2019.
England is roughly where New York was in 2012.
The Product Evolves
Every market that starts as a workaround eventually gets rebuilt. Guarantor insurance is no different.
Insurent created the category. Before HSTPA made the product essential, Insurent was selling a concept most NYC landlords had never considered: let an insurance company co-sign the lease. The underwriting was relatively blunt — broad risk tiers, standardized pricing, a model designed for a smaller market. But it worked, and it opened something that didn't exist before.
TheGuarantors scaled it. Rather than tenant-by-tenant approvals, TheGuarantors built relationships directly with landlords and property management platforms, embedding the guaranty into leasing workflows. Volume grew fast.
Both companies did something real. Both also built on infrastructure designed for a simpler market. As the tenant population diversified, pricing stayed coarse: broad income brackets, binary credit assessments, fee structures that charged similar rates to very different risk profiles. A 26-year-old H-1B engineer three months into a high-paying job and a freelancer with irregular deposits both fail a landlord's 40x screen. They are not the same risk. Pricing them identically is a worse deal for the tenant who actually qualifies.
That's the gap the next generation is filling. Tighter integrations with tenant screening and property management systems. Real-time income verification. Underwriting precise enough to actually differentiate risk rather than approximate it.
Insurent proved the model. TheGuarantors scaled it. The next chapter is making it smarter, and cheaper for the tenants who deserve a better price.
PandaGuarantee is part of that next chapter: real-time approvals, deeper platform integrations, and more precise underwriting backed by an AM Best A+ rated carrier. The regulatory environment that built this market isn't getting looser. The products serving it shouldn't stay static.