Renters are at the mercy of a Wild West housing market

In the torrential rain in London on Wednesday night I found myself not curled up on the sofa but traipsing the streets of Clapham with a mission.

I was accompanying my daughter in her so far fruitless quest for the holy grail, a flat to rent in the capital that is both habitable and affordable.

The property located, I sent my girl up to meet the landlord – let’s call him Jasper – believing that on her own she could better charm him into accepting her offer above the competition’s. How naïve.

As it turned out, this three-bed flat was perfect – that is, it had three bedrooms as advertised (not two and a box) and was passably well-preserved from previous tenants – and she and her friends began the bidding war.

The asking price is never enough now so the dilemma is how much more to proffer: one third of your monthly salary, half?

Their peers, in their early to mid-twenties and mostly just kicking off their careers in London, typically pay in the region of £1,200 each a month for accommodation if they have secured it recently.

So they pitched as high as they could go, were effusive to the point of parody in their email to the owner and sat back to wait.

A follow-up phone call with Jasper lasted half an hour, as he dangled them on the hook. He liked the sound of them, he said as if this was a job interview, but their combined income was much less than the next best bidders who earned £350,000 between them.

In the current climate, access to coveted city flats depends not only on ability to pay but wealth beyond most 23-year-olds’ scope. 

Negotiating with London landlords has long been fraught – this is my eighth year, on my daughters’ behalf, in the racket, not counting those distant deals I did in my own twenties. But in the past year, the market has become unmanageable, and not just in London.

Marvin Rees, the Labour mayor of Bristol, which has the country’s second highest rents, described the situation in his city as the Wild West.

He said, on average, rents had risen by 52 per cent in the last decade, with wages rising by just 24 per cent, and is calling for local authority rent controls.

The housing shortage and high mortgage rates have seen rents rising at the fastest pace on record, according to the Office of National Statistics, up 5.5 per cent in the past year

As demand massively outstrips supply, London rents rose the most, up 5.9 per cent in the 12 months to August, or an average of £340 more a month on a home, said estate agent Hamptons. According to Zoopla, private rents in London increased by 15.2 per cent in 2022.

Another estate agent, Guy Gittins of Foxtons, told City AM that the demand for property, in London at least, is caused by the backlog of buyers who were looking to move following Covid-19.

On top of this, landlords are selling up – buy-to-let properties accounted for 11 per cent of sales earlier this year according to Zoopla – because they can no longer make a profit with high mortgage rates and energy bills.

Meanwhile, data collected in the summer by flatshare website SpareRoom showed that a room in a shared house or flat in the capital will set renters back on average £971 a month, a surge of 19 per cent in a year.

Some blame Liz Truss, whose reckless mini budget of September 2022 sparked spiralling interest rate rises and rocked confidence in the UK economy. The housing market is still suffering the consequences.

But the rot goes back further. “The chopping and changing of prime ministers and chancellors, the factional infighting – all of it has hit the British people in the pocket,” wrote Pat McFadden, shadow chancellor, in the Mirror.

The government’s rent reforms will provide some protection for tenants, such as no-fault evictions, but won’t magic more properties on to the market.

Labour’s solution is to build more Green Belt homes and, in the shorter term, Sadiq Khan has backed a rent freeze, though that wouldn’t address the shortage of accommodation.

In Denmark, tenants can stay in their flats indefinitely, though there are caveats. in Germany, where more than half of households live in rented homes, the government is considering imposing a three-year rent freeze on landlords.

Here, the issue seems to be of far more pressing importance to twenty and thirtysomething voters, who are neither buying new boilers or cars, than net-zero about-turns.

Back in Clapham, Jasper, not unscrupulous (as far as I know) but just playing the property game, fielded 45 initial enquiries for his des res. 

He whittled these down to about seven viewings with the help of desperate tenant ‘a little bit about ourselves’ profiles – think Hinge ‘prompts’, only more wholesome.

At the time of writing, my daughter had yet to find out if she and her friends had nailed it this time. If she is lucky at last, then 44 other home hunters will be back at square one.

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