Rental Opportunity of the Week: Happy New Year, Landlords Are Still Evil

What is it? It is 2023’s first reminder that not only have they not fixed the rental market, not only have they done absolutely nothing to fix the rental market, but the rental market is rapidly – not slowly! – getting worse and more expensive.

Come on man. It’s like six days into the year. I’m still drinking 0% beer. I don’t need this kind of vibe right now Well this is the vibe thou shalt have!

How is January 2023 any worse than December 2022? Because it’s a New Year, and landlords with vacant properties going in to this new year have arbitrarily decided that their property is worth more now, magically, and upped their prices. Which means when your landlord reviews your contract at some point this year, they will look at these arbitrarily raised prices online and decide their property is now worth more because the other properties are “worth” more, and then they will raise your rent accordingly.

Didn’t they already do that last year though? Yeah.

And didn’t they already do that during COVID? Like you know how nobody you know had their rent reduced during COVID? Or, often, even frozen? Like our landlords tried to raise our rent during COVID? Yeah no yeah they did that.

So, to clarify: This is the third straight year of arbitrary rent raises despite salaries stagnating and a cost of living crisis when it comes to food, fuel, heat, &c.? Yeah.

And some people still try to say landlords are “not all bad people”, “entrepreneurs”, things of that nature? They do say that, yeah. Heh. The BBC is always doing an article about how they are alright.

Even the Mafia has the good grace to keep their rates reasonably stable The only difference between racketeering and landlordism is the first and 14th words of this definition: “Criminal acts, typically those involving extortion, that involve a scheme organised to extract illegal profits". Landlordism is legal. That’s it.

At least the Mafia contribute to culture The Mafia have a great body of work behind them, plus glamour. What do landlords have? Bluetooth headsets and no job.

Anyway. Where is it? Had a few to choose from this week – the £1,040 bed-in-a-kitchen in Cricklewood, the badly laid-out studio in Kidbrooke where you have to pay to use the washing machine, the wall-mounted TV in Royal Oak where there is no possible angle in the flat that you can actually watch it from – but ultimately I went for the incredibly expensive and incredibly narrow Bayswater studio where the bathroom sink is built directly into the back of the toilet.

What is there to do locally? All the centre-of-town things that have the sheen of richness about them but are actually, beneath the surface, quite dreadful and empty: “go to Oxford Street”, “go to Bond Street”, “go to Hyde Park”, “go to Selfridges”, things of that nature.

Alright, how much are they asking? You haven’t seen the photos yet, so this isn’t yet an astonishing number to you, but: £2,670 PCM.

Alright, now you can see the photos:

So, let’s see what £2,670 PCM buys us, shall we? Firstly based on the shape of it it’s just… half a room. I cannot see what it could have possibly been before it was this flat other than “half a room”. It has the dimensions of a hallway – a narrow one – but because it leads nowhere, it can’t be a hallway. It doesn’t have any of the legacy fittings of a kitchen or a bathroom. I think this was a full-sized room, once, and it was split in half and made into this. That’s the only logical explanation I can see for this shape of room. I think you can knock on the hollow wall and be heard in the other half a room opposite you, which is also, inexplicably, a two-and-a-half grand a month half-flat.

Secondly, we should focus on the impracticality of the bed, which folds down over the sofa so exactly that it blocks off all access to the built-in mirrored wardrobe opposite. So you can either sleep, or sit on the sofa, or access the wardrobe, but you cannot do all three without moving something around. I don’t live in a fancy high-faluting la-de-da life in central London, so I might not know what constitutes “high class”, but I do not have to move my entire bed to get to my wardrobe. The bed/wardrobe/sofa arrangement is in the same room space as the kitchenette, so, essentially, this is just a bed in a kitchen again.

Again: I don’t live in a fancy &c. &c. &c. but my bed isn’t in my kitchen. If I were to ever go completely and utterly mad and decide to pay £2,670 a month as rent, I wouldn’t even put “the bed must not be in the kitchen” on my wishlist of things I’m looking for in a property, because that is such a default expectation for me. Call me a snob if you must! I just don’t want to sleep in the cooking room! That’s for cooking!

Then I guess we should whizz through the rest of the bits: The TV is mounted on the only wall it can’t be seen from – you could sit on the sofa and sort of look sideways at it, or you could lean on your kitchen counter and look up at it, but neither are ideal (I know I go on about TV placement a lot but it seems to be an emerging trend among London landlords to install screens that nobody really wants there in absolutely impossible places). There is a classic example of “inexplicable extra furniture” in the shape of a fold-out chair, and your laundry airer is quite cleverly stored on the back of the bathroom door, though I cannot figure out where you are supposed to wash said laundry in the first place – the flat description says there is a washing machine, but I cannot see one in any of the photos.

The only spare electrical socket seems to be installed halfway up a wall, the bathroom sink is built into the back of the toilet cistern (I don’t live in a fancy &c. &c. &c. but my toilet and my bathroom sink are separate installations. Again: if I’m paying £2,670 per month in rent, I’m not writing down “I want my toilet and my bathroom sink to be separate objects” in the initial e-mail to the estate agent, because that really should be a fucking given), and – vitally – it does not seem like anybody has ever lived here, ever.

I often find that the most haunting thing about these rental properties: They have been developed, at cost, on the great assumption that someone will want to live there, and the price at the end has been totted up based mainly on how much the property cost to acquire and how much the building costs were to cover and how best to pay that investment off in the fastest time possible. To look at this flat is to see absolutely zero human thought into it at all: just robotic profit and loss column penny-counting.

How can any mammal with a beating heart walk into this slender little flip-down sofa room and go: “Yeah, seems good actually, and nice. Two grand? Two-and-a-half grand?” Still, Happy New Year. More of this. Much much more of this. 

@joelgolby