Most of the pubs are owned by the PubCos Back in the past it was mostly brewery owned with 6 big brewers owning most of them. So a law got passed in the 90s which limited the breweries to a max of 2k pubs. Unfortunately what happened was we ended up with a bunch of very large Pubcos who were often linked to a particular brewery anyway (some were formed by former brewery execs and the pubs were "donated" in return for an agreement to keep buying from the brewery"). The Pubcos started with low rents but high stock prices but now go for both high rents and high stocks. Its why often see pubs changing hands frequently when someone tries the dream of pub landlordship but runs out of money. Its why Wetherspoons is "cheap" since generally they convert buildings and so have a freehouse model.