Soaring rents, fierce competition for ever fewer accommodations: the pressures linked to the severe cost of living crisis that is raging across the Channel are weighing on the London rental market, where candidates sometimes struggle for long months before finding a roof.

Cyndi Cheng, a 34-year-old Hong Konger, thought she would never make it. “The competition is intense”, says the young woman, who arrived only a few months earlier in the country, with a new visa introduced by London in response to the drastic national security law imposed by Beijing in June 2020.

The most difficult: “tick all the boxes and meet all the criteria” required to rent a property, she explains to AFP. Lacking a full-time job, an owner refused to let her visit. Many others didn’t even answer him.

For a particular accommodation, which she liked, “I checked my messages every hour”, she says. She finally found another accommodation, “tiny and which doesn’t really have a window”.

If the competition is fierce, it is because there is a crying lack of housing: for every ten potential new tenants, there was only one property available in February, according to figures from Propertymark, a professional organization of the sector.

It’s “the toughest time we’ve ever seen for tenants,” said Matt Hutchinson, director of SpareRoom, a popular colocation platform. “And we’ve been running the site for 20 years now.”

Paris Williams, 24, has been looking for new accommodation for more than a year, without success. “Is it because I’m black?” she asks.

According to her, the gap between supply and demand gives owners full latitude to “pick and choose” who they want, even if it means having discriminatory practices.

Generation Rent, an organization that defends tenants’ rights, says it has seen an increase in discrimination against LGBT and ethnic minority tenants in recent months. Candidates are sometimes asked for detailed biographies and photos.

The hardening of the rental market in the British capital can be explained in particular by the crisis in the cost of living, with inflation which has been clinging for months above 10%, to which must be added the surge in interest rates real estate loans.

Some landlords have passed on the costs to tenants, others have chosen to sell, reducing the stock of available housing.

In any case, rents have jumped: they reached in the first quarter of this year the record level of 952 pounds (about 1,075 euros) per month on average for a room in London, according to a study by SpareRoom.

The hardest part for tenants is “getting the landlord’s attention (…) Most people don’t even get a visit”, describes Mr. Hutchinson.

Joey Mazars, 28, tells the behind-the-scenes story: Last November, he and his roommate used SpareRoom to find a third person to share their accommodation.

Within 48 hours of posting, they received around 120 messages.

Impossible to examine each application in detail: the two roommates decided to establish certain criteria to filter the candidates, by eliminating for example those who had “strange hobbies”, says Mr. Mazars to AFP.

The situation “has changed dramatically over the past two years”, he says, recalling receiving significantly fewer messages when he had to find another tenant last year.

Under these conditions, many are downright reluctant to start and are “forced to stay in housing conditions that do not suit them”, according to Will Barber-Taylor, a manager of Generation Rent.

He cites, for example, people who stay in relationships they would like to leave or who live in dilapidated housing because they fear they will not be able to find a new roof.

The government is to present this year a long-awaited bill to improve the rights of tenants, who are less protected than in other European countries, notably France.

But that could backfire on tenants, Mr Hutchinson says, pushing more landlords to pull their properties off the market.

04/15/2023 06:44:18 – London (AFP) – © 2023 AFP