As a starting point for this book, this report followed the impression that private initiatives were increasingly being used to provide social rental dwellings in a number of European countries. The clear demarcation of the funding and roles of each sector of the housing market seemed to be becoming blurred. The private sector would no longer work solely with private finance and no longer operate solely along strictly commercial lines responding to market demand. The social sector, meanwhile, would no longer be funded only by the state and no longer be provided only by non-profit organizations. In other words, this report assumed that the boundaries between social and market renting were becoming more blurred by these initiatives. 

In order to find out whether there was any truth to the observation, this report has collected material in this book about the similarities and differences between what this report called social and market rented housing. The main distinction between these two forms of tenure that this report identified was that market housing was allocated according to effective demand and social housing was allocated according to need, the assumption being that the market cannot provide according to a socially determined level of need that is different from effective demand. In order to analyze the similarities and differences between social and market rented housing, this report developed and applied the concept of a gap between the two forms of tenure, both empirically and theoretically. For the theoretical approach, this report set the aim of operationalizing a concept of competition. 

This report used information from a variety of sources, mostly the available literature in scientific journals and policy documents and on websites of governments and other organizations and aims to have provided what may be called an up-to-date commentary (up to sometime in the year 2008 for most countries) on the nature of housing and rental policy in each country. 

In short, the book aims to provide information on two levels. It is an ‘information handbook’ on the one hand, and on the other it provides an analytical, evidence-based discussion of several issues concerning the rental sector in the countries studied. It aims to provide much more information than simply an answer to the observation.