Fascinating. My experience in the US is the exact opposite. Corporate landlords are generally awful, where everything they rent out is full of shoddy repairs and minimum-cost ‘luxury facilities’ to drive up rent. Private landlords, particularly where the owners live in the same building, are almost always better. My experience has largely been in urban areas of the US, not sure about smaller towns; I suspect higher demand is what allows for it.
In my experience, the main benefit of corporate landlords is predictability. Especially when they are large. They have a reputation, and you know in advance what you get.
Private landlords are a gamble. They are better on the average, but the variance is also higher. Because most private landlords only have a handful of properties, it's effectively impossible to know in advance what they will be like if something goes wrong.
Individual experiences are anecdotal but here's a few of mine.
My Son lives in a "mega landlord" unit in Saskatoon (Canada) and it is well maintained and his rental fee is very reasonable.
My Son-in-law lives in a "mega landlord" unit in New Jersey (USA) and it is also in excellent condition.
I personally rented from a private individual in Connecticut for several years and it was a slumhouse.
Landlord was never around, no one to call when things didnt work. we actually had to fix the heating system in Jan because we were freezing cold and the owner was once again MIA.
My guess here is that in part to how common renting has traditionally been in the UK (pre WWI , something like 9/10 homes were rented, this greatly declined to ~7% until rising again since the nineties). More than a few big UK landlords have been around for centuries.
