Welcome to the London Hunger Games

We have now rented in three major cities and the most cutthroat by far has been London.

I thought a decade living in SF (and one year abroad in Tokyo) would have adequately prepared me for all kinds of renting nonsense. I have criss-crossed miles to attend open houses, trawled hundreds of Zillow and Craigslist posts, negotiated contracts on my own and with five roommates, navigated ultra-strict rental requirements in a foreign language, dealt with massive disruptions like flooding and burst sewage pipes (during COVID!), and defended my tenant rights against sketchy landlords. All this in two of the most expensive rental markets in the world.

Yet somehow, the UK managed to exceed my worst expectations. Welcome to the nightmarish world of the London rental market.

Lack of transparency

Fundamentally, London’s rental market lacks transparency. Structural and social barriers block access to information, which leads to massive inefficiencies in pricing, availability, and time spent in the housing search.

Say what you want about the American real estate market, it does have open access to property listing data. As early as the late 1800s, real estate associations had started freely sharing information about property listings. This knowledge-sharing eventually evolved into multiple listing services (MLS), organizations that accumulate and share information about real estate.

Although there is no single centralized US property database, the MLS system has a data standard that can allow different listing services to interoperate. For San Francisco and the greater Bay Area, there are several different regional realtor associations, which have reciprocal agreements allowing properties to appear across the different listing platforms. Manhattan has a de facto MLS called Residential Listing Service (RLS), with other listing systems operating in the outer boroughs.

MLSListings is one of the MLS systems operating in northern California.

The US system has set the global standard for real estate data transparency, with a key DOJ antitrust settlement in 2008 enabling Internet brokers to have equal access to MLS data as traditional real estate brokerages. Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com, and other home aggregator websites are all built on top of the open data from the listing services. So even in the ultra-competitive markets like SF and NYC, freely accessible market data allows tenants to more effectively find homes that fit their requirements and budget.

Other countries have also established MLS systems to varying degrees of public transparency. For example, Japanese realtors have access to REINS (Real Estate Information Network System) which provides the same listings to all agents nationwide but does not provide direct access to consumers. Renters and buyers can access properties through online aggregators like Suumo but some listings can be missing or out-of-date, so home seekers are forced to work with a real estate agents to get the full range of options.

Meanwhile, the UK has no true MLS due to significant fragmentation in property agencies. Rightmove or Zoopla, online property portals that monetize through advertising, offer a convenient but not 100% comprehensive view of housing inventory. And unlike Japan, there is actually no consolidated database that shows all the available properties, even only to agents and brokers.

Rightmove is the largest property portal in the UK. Some landlords advertise directly on the site to cut out the middlemen, but it’s very difficult to find affordable and desirable options using Rightmove on it’s own.

Instead, each real estate agency operates their own list of properties and promotes their listings to the online portals. Sharing to the online portals is usually done as an afterthought, significantly delayed from when the property is first available to show to the agency’s clientele. By providing early access to their customers, the most desirable homes are snatched up quickly and don’t even make it online.

This information asymmetry creates a lot of panic for home searchers. As Ellie Muir writes in “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.

As a prospective tenant, you feel compelled to sign up for all the agencies to even have a chance at seeing the best properties. Once I learned how agencies worked, I quickly gave up any delusion that I could just trawl through the online property portals myself like I did back in SF. I gave away my contact information to all the real estate agencies freely, privacy be damned. I dutifully repeated my housing requirements, budget, and search criteria over and over to each new agency, parroting the exact same lines at least a dozen times.

Since there is no customer exclusivity or loyalty to a single agent or company, the agencies operate as a free-for-all system. Individual agents are constantly trying to steal clients from each other to close the deal, even within the same company! So having one conversation with Luke at Foxtons can lead to Victoria and Ammar asking if you are looking for housing. They can be from the same or different Foxton branches. It was so deeply frustrating being called by random opportunistic agents that it overcame my innate people-pleasing. I started hanging up as soon as I realized I was in another useless conversation.

UK real estate agents all insist on calling you on the phone, even if you explicitly tell them your communication preferences. It’s such a widespread annoyance that there are multiple online threads complaining about it. There’s no way to stop them from calling you, so god help you if you’re also trying to work a full-time job while doing a housing search.

My phone was constantly blowing up at random hours during the workday.

But if you’re seriously looking for housing, you can’t really ignore the persistent phone calls. There is a genuine chance that an agent is calling with a great property and you need to drop everything to view it immediately.

The worst part of all: the estate agencies capitalize on people’s anxieties to drive artificial urgency. I kept hearing about this or that perfect flat coming on the market soon, only to follow up a few days later to find that it already was claimed by someone else. The less scrupulous agents will keep trying to push properties outside of your search criteria—flats that far too small, too old, too over budget—to persuade you to put in an offer.

As the housing search drags on and on, the pressure to compromise increases as you get more desperate to secure a flat.

Predatory behavior and scams, oh my

The lack of transparency in the UK rental market already puts renters on unequal footing. Mix in some not-technically-illegal sketchy behavior, garnish with the possibility of actual scams, and now you have the full devilish cocktail that is the London rental experience.

For starters, the advertised rental price of a property is never what you end up paying. It’s a regular practice to offer the flat to the highest bidder. The Independent interviewed Nye Jones, head of campaign at renters’ rights organisation Generation Rent, who summarized this perfect storm of scarcity and competition:

[Nye] cites the cutthroat private rental market in the capital, which sees flats shown to 50 or so people, culminating in bidding wars and properties going for hundreds of pounds over the asking price as a principal factor.

Prospective renters simply have no leverage in a market that is over-saturated with hopeful applicants. As the Home Builders Federation found in their 2023 report comparing the UK to other international housing markets, this country ranks dead last in terms of availability:

This dearth of properties makes England the most difficult place in the developed world to find a home, with the rate of available properties per member of the population at less than 1%, the lowest rate of all OECD countries.

And not only do you need to bid a higher monthly rent to be competitive, you also need to offer large amounts of money in advance. As the nonprofit Citizen’s Advice notes on costs of starting to rent from a private landlord:

You’ll usually be asked to pay the rent for the first 1 or 2 months before you move in. This is called paying ‘rent in advance’.

There’s no legal limit on how much rent in advance you can be asked for. You might be asked to pay more if there’s a problem with your credit check or references.

This advanced payment is in addition to the security deposit and any additional agent or tenancy fees. It’s not uncommon to hear five months or even a year’s worth of rent offered upfront. My coworker who moved to London straight out of university had to pay six months of rent in advance, before he even officially started his full-time job.

However, there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon. Renters (myself included) are patiently waiting for much-needed reforms in the Renters’ Rights Bill, which is currently working it’s way through Parliament.

The text of the bill clearly illustrates the risks and abuses that tenants face currently. From the section on Rent in Advance:

The Renters’ Rights Bill will end the practice of landlords demanding large amounts of rent in advance from tenants looking to secure a tenancy. This unfair practice can encourage prospective tenants to stretch their finances to the limit, preventing them from moving within, or accessing the sector altogether.

Once enacted, the Renters’ Rights Bill will amend the Tenant Fees Act 2019 to prohibit landlords or letting agents from requiring or accepting any payment of rent in advance of the tenancy being entered into. A landlord will only be able to require up to one month’s rent (or 28 days’ rent for tenancies with rental periods of less than one month) once a tenancy agreement has been signed and before commencement. The Renters’ Rights Bill will also amend the Housing Act 1988 to provide that, once a tenancy starts, a landlord will be unable to enforce any terms in a tenancy agreement that require rent to be paid in advance of the agreed due date.

This measure will protect prospective tenants from large requests for rent in advance that are beyond their means.

And later on, the bill describes unfair rental bidding practices:

The Renters’ Rights Bill will end the unfair practice of pitting renters against each other in bidding wars. By outlawing rental bidding, we will level the playing field for renters and crack down on the minority of unscrupulous landlords who make the most of the housing crisis by forcing tenants to bid for their properties.

Once enacted, the Renters’ Rights Bill will require landlords and letting agents to publish an asking rent for their property. It will also prohibit them from asking for, encouraging, or accepting any bids above this price.

By directly tackling rental bidding, the Renters’ Rights Bill will improve the experiences of prospective tenants across England and ensure that the exploitative approach currently taken by a minority of unscrupulous landlords is ended for good.

Examining all the bill’s proposed reforms paints a very dismal picture of the rental experience in London currently. People are frequently subjected to:

• no fault (section 21) evictions
• “backdoor” evictions through unreasonable rent increases
• denial of renters based on pets
• discrimination against tenants on benefits or with children
• viewing fees and tenancy setup fees
• rent bidding wars and excessive upfront payments
• dangerous living conditions such as mold

Any single one of these violations might sound manageable on its own, but the reality of London housing stock and predatory landlord behavior is that tenants are frequently suffering many rental issues at once. Folks are being squeezed by landlords to pay more than they can afford for old, delapidated moldy flats.

Peter Apps writes in The Londoner,

Spend any time scrolling through the listings on Rightmove or Zoopla, and you’ll see thousands of properties unfit to live in: tiny, cramped flats with rotting joinery and black mould creeping up the walls. But people do live in these places — in a city with a housing crisis as acute as London’s, there isn’t any alternative.

This is also echoed in the Home Builders Federation 2023 report:

The UK also has amongst the oldest housing in Europe, with 78% of homes having been built before 1980, compared with an EU average of 61%, and 38% of the UK’s housing stock being built before 1946, compared with an EU average of 18%.

This has an impact on the condition of homes: 15% of English homes failed to meet the Decent Homes Standard in 2020. This is the highest proportion of substandard homes in Europe, and significantly higher than many other countries including Germany (12%), Bulgaria (11%), Lithuania (11%) and Poland (6%).

We’ve already personally witnessed many of these rental problems. In addition to paying an infuriating amount to secure our centuries-old flat, we have checked off the following from the Renters’ Rights sections:

• Pets: we were denied multiple suitable flats because of our pet ownership, even some explicitly listed as pet friendly
• Discrimination against children: another American expat, while he was actively touring a home, was suddenly told the house was no longer available when the landlord learned that he had children
• Mold: my coworker signed a flat for her family (including two children) and it was handed over uncleaned with black mold on the wallpaper, with no apparent concern from the landlord

We didn’t escape the mold either since a weird fungal bloom appeared the week we moved in. Even the wealthy are not safe: Janet Jackson found black mold in her £10 million Chelsea flat and is suing her landlord for the living conditions.

A picture of the strange mold that was emerging from the floorboards near the basement bathroom. It was swiftly dealt with and hasn’t returned… yet.

And still, these are just the technically-not-illegal problems that renters face.

Actual scams seem much more prevalent here too. We have a friend who paid thousands in fees to the agent for a promised rental, only to be told the flat was never available. The agent refused to return the money that was already paid.

To the victor goes the spoils

Though I’ve painted quite a horrifying picture, it’s not all doom and gloom.

Ultimately we did survive the treacherous process of securing a decent London flat. We navigated the gauntlet of bidding and advance payments, defeating the other competitors in the rental equivalent of the Hunger Games without losing (too much) money. I am thankful we ultimately found a reasonable landlord who directly manages his property instead of a faceless estate agency.

Here’s to the hope that things get better. The Renters’ Rights Bill is expected to pass in late 2025 and is now in final stages. These fixes can’t come soon enough.

There’s still more work to be done to fix the lack of transparency and limited housing supply that will continue to affect the rental market.

So for those still searching for their next flat in the meantime—be careful, be patient, and keep your wits about you. May the odds be ever in your favor.

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