It was a sunny Thursday morning when I met my landlord for the first time. I was completely naked and dying from the worst hangover of my life.
With barely enough time to register the knock on my door, I screamed as the landlord and his lackey burst into my bedroom for an inspection they hadn’t warned me about. When they finally left, we got a text: “Please make sure the property is in an acceptable condition the next time we visit.”
We never heard from him again.
That was about 10 years ago when I was a student, paying £700 a month to live in a four-bedroom flat on a run-down estate in Kennington. I wish I could say that my experiences in the Wild West of London’s rental market have improved, but I’d be lying.
After decades of cheap renovation, London’s rental properties are in a state of comical disrepair. In one flat, my flatmate and I spent an entire night trying to keep our sink from flooding the kitchen, which tended to happen when we used the washing machine thanks to a creative plumbing job the landlord had done while he was squeezing an extra bedroom into the flat.
I am now 28 and there is a Section 21 notice in my inbox. My current landlord has decided to increase the rent beyond what I can afford, after having already increased it last year (the proposed increase would have been 14% in just two years).
Haggling didn’t help – my landlord also owns the property next door and it’s on the market for the rent he wants, so my neighbors are at least in the same boat.
I have a month to live somewhere and then declutter. I have spent a lot of time throwing out or selling all the worldly possessions that I suspect will not fit in a new place – my fault for having the temerity to buy stuff, I guess.
I’m certainly not the only one struggling with this. My friends live in a state of constant fear of the next rent increase, their income-to-rent ratio somehow getting worse, and yet they’re still getting raises and promotions.
On Twitter I see people asking how they can advocate for more lenient rents. Some say they’ve been hit with “bait and switch” Section 21, where their landlord decides their tenant can’t pay rent, lies about selling to get them out, and then puts the property back on the market for the rent they want.
Official figures show that private rents paid by tenants in the UK rose by 6.2% in the past year, with the figure rising to 6.8% in London.
That’s what the ONS says. What my colleagues say is that every lease renewal comes with a rent increase. Without exception. Usually it’s a round number that’s been plucked out of thin air – £100, £200, £300. If that doesn’t fit your salary, which it absolutely doesn’t, then too bad.
Of course, all this would be fine if property standards in London were improving in any meaningful way. But that’s not happening. Britain has one of the oldest housing stocks in Europe and most of the homes I’ve seen have been untouched since they were bought in the buy-to-let boom of the 1990s.
In my previous place, I watched in bewilderment as a handyman hired cheaply by a letting agent drilled a series of holes in the wall to “vent” the damp coming in through a poorly sealed chimney. He returned a week later to declare that the wall was “only stained,” sealed the holes, repainted the wall, and left. A week later, the damp returned.
I knew little about the man who owned that house, and he knew even less about us, let alone the property. I once had the privilege of speaking to him on the phone, sighing as I heard him ask, “How many bedrooms does the house have again? Sorry, I’m a bit busy – I’m hosting a wedding in my garden.”
After some digging, it transpired that the house had been bought in 1999 for the bargain price of £170,000, meaning that we had effectively paid off our landlord’s mortgage during our stay alone. Houses in the area now cost just under £1 million.
It turns out that many of the homes here were bought during the aforementioned buy-to-let boom, with real estate doubling as a retirement for the baby boomers. I would advise renters to never check the sales history of their home if they want to keep their sanity.
That’s why I roll my eyes when I hear rent increases being justified by the mortgage crisis, net zero targets for energy efficiency or the removal of tax relief, because I’m not sure many landlords in London are actually facing these problems.
Data from analyst Moneyfacts shows the average mortgage on investment properties fell steadily by almost two percentage points between 2014 and 2020, long before tax breaks were phased out.
What’s more, those daunting net zero targets were scrapped by Michael Gove after landlords threatened to turn over the Monopoly board and sell up rather than face even a shred of regulation.
Others condescendingly suggest that rising rents are a matter of supply and demand. Rents are high because six desperate losers like me are chasing every room in this city. Some would call that profiteering.
All this to say that I’m not sure what “costs” everyone is talking about. Rents were going up without any justification long before the Truss mini-budget was passed, and tenants have no way of challenging a rent increase if, for example, they suspect their landlord is making a lot of money from a property that has no mortgage on it.
There’s a knock on the door – someone wants to know how to get into the Airbnb around the corner. It hadn’t occurred to me that the Tower Hamlets district, let alone the street where I live that’s regularly dodged by drug dealers, would be a hotbed of holiday lettings. But official figures show that one in twenty properties here is a second home.
That’s really good, right? In a borough where there are 20,000 people on the waiting list for social housing, nearly 8,000 properties aren’t even occupied full-time. It’s pretty cool that we’ve allowed that. Why Airbnb is even allowed to operate in London is beyond me (in New York, homeowners aren’t allowed to rent their homes for less than 30 days unless the host stays with the guests).
Displaced tenants like me have to turn to Spareroom, a website that theoretically allows tenants with a spare room to find a roommate. The experience is similar to using Tinder, in that you’re forced to lie about your personality in order to get strangers to like you (everyone loves the pub, but also a quiet night in; tidy but not obsessive; social but aware of other people’s space, etc.).
Spareroom hilariously criticizes the government for allowing the rental crisis to get to this point.
“Demand for rental properties has skyrocketed, but supply has nearly halved since 2017,” the company’s open letter to the finance minister said. That high demand means most guest rooms are snapped up within a week, but to inquire about a new listing before then, you’ll need to pay a subscription fee.
As with dating apps, the experience is marred by catfishes: flats that look great in photos but are dirty and full of broken furniture in real life. The worst offenders are almost always advertised by estate agents, who I have learned to avoid.
I visited a four-bedroom flat last week – it had a tiny kitchen and an equally tiny shared bathroom. What I assume was once a living room is now a bedroom and all four have coded locks on the door. £1,000 per person per month.
The Labour Party is going to save everything, we are told, by building a bunch of houses in the green belt to redress the imbalance between supply and demand.
I have no affinity for Nimbys and it would be fun to upset them. But I wonder how this is going to solve the immediate problem of sky-high rents for run-down housing in cities where young people are supposed to live and work.
Are we expecting all of Britain’s twenty-somethings to move into new-build homes in the shires? And when these hundreds of thousands of homes finally appear, will existing landlords stop demanding ever-increasing rents?
Why is every new house here only affordable for the super-rich parents of foreign students? Why do we encourage developers to keep building them? I’m not convinced Labour has the answers to many of these questions.
I think it is a shame that London is like this. It is an insult to a city that is so great that housing here has deteriorated while those in charge extort ever greater portions of their income from their tenants. No one has the right to live in London, but it shouldn’t be this hard.