How renting in London became an unimaginable hellscape

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.

“We haven’t seen the end of it,” says Hutchinson. “Many homeowners with mortgages are terrified of losing their homes and they’re worried about being able to keep up payments.” This has only fuelled the phenomenon of live-in landlords – people renting out their spare rooms to lodgers to help pay their mortgage, and charging high rates for a singular room. One SpareRoom advert went viral last week after a landlord advertised a single bedroom for rent at £1,350 a month, with several strict living conditions for their potential tenant, including having no guests, not being home in the evening hours before 8.30pm and asking for permission to use the washing machine.

Hutchinson says that SpareRoom has seen a huge uptick in listings from live-in landlords trying to make money out of small spaces in their home, with wild stipulations attached. “People are trying to rent out any space they can find,” he says, adding that the site routinely removes listings that are charging to rent “Harry Potter-style cupboards under the stairs” that are obviously “not suitable spaces for people to be living in”.

While it’s easy to finger-wag at landlords for preying on desperate young flat sharers in London, the reality today is that homeowners aren’t getting a great deal, either. Average monthly payments for first-time buyers in 2019 were £667, and this figure has shot up by 61 per cent to £1,075 per month, according to Rightmove. Hutchinson says there’s a cycle of mistrust in the housing market that’s making it difficult for everyone. “We’ve got this strange situation that we haven’t had before where tenants are obviously not happy, and after the mini-budget homeowners are really struggling, and we’re also seeing landlords leave the market and struggling too,” he says. “It’s usually been the case that at least one or two of those groups have been OK at any given time, but nobody has much confidence in the housing market at this point.”

However, according to Jae Vail, a spokesperson for the London Renters Union (LRU), mortgage-free landlords have still continued to hike rents and exploit tenants. “In the past 18 months, we’ve seen the majority of mortgage-free landlords increasing rents when they didn’t need to. Huge portions of the housing system have been handed over to these very highly leveraged private landlords who are looking to make a quick buck,” he says. According to SpareRoom data, the average rent for a London room in late 2024 is £993 per month, which means that you need to be earning a minimum salary of £35,000 to live semi-comfortably and afford that rent. Vail says that many members of the LRU who might be single parents, or on minimum wage jobs, are being told that there’s a minimum income threshold even before they apply for a rental advert.

This week, it was reported that the issue of housing shortages is not going to be solved anytime soon. Despite the current Labour government’s pledge to build 1.5 million homes in its first five years of office, nearly three-quarters of local authorities expect to abandon, pause or delay current council housing projects due to struggling finances, in a blow to Labour’s desired large-scale building plans. Meanwhile, most councils are predicted to struggle to deliver new social housing at scale as their budgets are on the “brink of collapse”, according to research commissioned by Southwark Council.

Vail tells me that the privatisation of council homes has played a huge role in this, and cites “horror stories” where people are being asked to pay 12 months’ rent up front. “Private landlords maintain a lot of power,” he says. “People are being treated like an income stream rather than human beings. It’s happening because of the way the system is set up and the lack of laws. There’s not a lot of enforcement of the laws that do exist around housing safety, around benefits, discrimination and other types of discrimination. Right now, there are 320,000 households on the social housing waitlist, and many of our members are constantly being pushed out of areas that they could once afford.”

The Labour government has proposed to ban upfront rent payments and bidding wars to improve renters’ rights, but it remains to be seen when or if this will happen.

As for that mouldy flat I left last year, I recently returned to collect a parcel and got talking with the new tenants. They told me the three of them are paying £200 more a month than we did – that’s £600 for the flat overall, adding up to a total of £7,200 per year. In the end, we can play the blame game as much as we like, but whether it’s landlord greed, the privatisation of the council housing stock, or the former government’s economic mismanagement, I know who’s the worst off here. It’s the tenants.