In the 1980s, British banking laws were changed to allow building societies to offer banking services equivalent to normal banks. Building societies, in the classic form, were mutual organisations, jointly owned by those saving and borrowing: from the 1980s a number of societies, under pressure from members, `demutualised' to become a commercial enterprise with shares like any other company: members of the society would get a `windfall' as their share of the assets of the society. This happened to a number of the larger societies, several of which were bought out by banks after their demutualisation. A movement arose whereby investors would open a savings account with a mutual building society, thereby getting voting rights in the society, and pressurise for a vote on demutualisation, with the intent of getting the anticipated windfall cash payment as a result. A number of societies managers looked down on such investers, who were termed `carpetbaggers', maintaining that as mutual societies, they could supply better and cheaper home loans than the banks and demutualised societies, as they only had to make a profit to cover their operational costs, and had no need to generate an additional profit to return to shareholders. In the end, after a number of large demutualisations, and pressure from carpetbaggers moving from one building society to another to cream off the windfalls, most of the remaining societies modified their rules of membership in the late 1990s. The method usually adopted is membership rules to ensure that anyone newly joining a society will be unable for the first few years, to get any profit out of a demutualisation. With the chance of a quick profit removed, the demutualisations have currently (December 2001) slowed considerably.