How renting in London became unimaginable hellscape

Ellie Muir, The Independent

I have a special motto for approaching London’s rental market: choose violence. Not in the literal sense — I don’t aggressively chase estate agents down the street or wallop landlords over the head with a frying pan — it’s more of a mindset. When the yearly tenancy ends and I’ve got a matter of months to find somewhere new to live, I become abrasive, uncompromising and, well, unbearable. I dedicate every waking hour to finding a flat, my phone is programmed to ping each time a new property is added to Rightmove and my social life becomes non-existent so that I’m free to attend an impromptu viewing at any given moment.

After viewing dozens of properties that are optimistically advertised online — that “spacious and characterful” third bedroom? It’s actually a cupboard — my flatmates and I might find something we actually like. At this point, the desperation kicks in further: I try to manifest our desired outcome, using my GCSE drama skills to present myself as the most perfect tenant that ever lived.

I triple-call estate agents, and, if pushed, I turn up at their offices unannounced when they don’t reply. Put simply, I’m not a person anymore; I’m a flat-hunting “can I speak to your manager?” robot competing in the London rental market equivalent of the Hunger Games. It sounds slightly unhinged and exhausting, right? Unfortunately, these are the survival skills that I’ve developed from renting in this hellscape for six years. I have personal anecdotes that include a heated bidding war that ended with another prospective tenant offering the landlord a full six months’ rent up front to get ahead, attending a tense viewing with 30 others who all seemed to be on the brink of collapse, and nearly getting conned into signing a phoney contract by a dodgy estate agent. What’s worse is that after going through this whole ordeal to eventually secure a place to live, the results are anticlimactic.

Before you can even lift a glass to your new humble abode, you may discover that the property is damp and mouldy, has a freezer full of rotting chicken (this happened to a friend), is covered in chewing gum (so did this), or that your landlord is the worst person to ever exist. Take my last place — tiny, falling apart, no living room — which turned out to be an illegal sublet, and after some Facebook stalking, we discovered that the man posing as the estate agent was actually the landlord’s son.

These stories are part of what’s become a universal experience. Eleanor, 26, tells me of her horrifying search for a four-bed property in east London with three of her friends, each with fairly realistic budgets of £800-£900 per month. Between the four of them, they viewed more than 30 properties and it took three months to finally sign a tenancy agreement. In that time, it impacted Eleanor’s mental health, and relations between her housemates began to sour. “We had a Google sheet that we added all of the properties to and were turning up to viewings where you would have to queue around the block,” she recalls, exasperated. “It was a really awful time. We had arguments and nearly called off living together because it was such a relentlessly stressful time.”

Eleanor first moved to London when she was 18 and has been renting ever since, but the process of moving once a year has started grating on her. “People say that moving house is one of the most stressful things that you can do, and when you’re renting, you’re having to do that nearly every year. It has such a horrible impact on your mental health when it’s so relentless and miserable.” Eleanor describes the flat she and her friends secured as “objectively s***” – they quickly discovered that the landlord was unreasonable and was knowingly letting it out in an unsafe condition. “We were being pushed to the bitter end and we had no choice but to take the lowest of the low,” says Eleanor. “It was really rough and it’s tarnished my experience of living in London.”

Sure, renting in London has never been a joy — London is one of the most densely populated cities in Europe with a dwindling housing stock. But the hell of renting worsened when lockdown restrictions lifted in 2022, and the demand for property soared. Matt Hutchinson, communications director and housing expert for the flatshare site SpareRoom, tells me that when the world opened up again, the demand for rentals “went way beyond anything we’ve seen before”. At its worst, in August and September 2022, there were an average of nine people to every available room (that ratio was about two and half people during pre-pandemic levels). “That’s when we started to see people queueing around the street to view properties and saw all of those horror stories unfold,” says Hutchinson.

The situation wasn’t helped by Liz Truss’s mini-budget announcement in September 2022, which fuelled a dramatic spike in mortgage rates and meant that landlords were increasing rental fees to meet their own soaring payments.