On bidding wars, magic mould, and the strange pride of surviving the rental market

I went to a flat viewing last week and there were so many people there that I genuinely thought I had stumbled into a protest, and as I reported back to Bohiney Magazine and to my long-suffering editors at The London Prat, who publish my ongoing chronicle of housing-related humiliation, the truly bleak part is that this is now completely normal. Renting in London has stopped being a transaction and become an identity, a competitive sport, and a personality trait all at once.

The viewing as a blood sport

The modern London flat viewing is a Hunger Games with a deposit. Twenty strangers shuffle through a damp box that the listing described, with breathtaking optimism, as a “cosy garden studio,” all of us performing the strange theatre of pretending we are not desperate while being visibly, profoundly desperate. We compliment the landlord. We laugh at the agent’s jokes. We do not mention the mould, a living organism of such size and confidence that it deserves its own tenancy agreement, because mentioning the mould marks you out as a troublemaker, and troublemakers do not get the flat.

Then comes the bidding. Yes, the bidding. We are now expected to offer above the asking rent, to bid against one another for the privilege of overpaying for a room in which you cannot fully extend your arms. I have watched grown adults offer six months’ rent in advance, references from a previous landlord, a character witness, and what I can only assume was a small blood sacrifice, all for a flat with a view of a brick wall and a boiler that makes sounds like a dying whale.

The numbers nobody can quite believe

This is not me being dramatic, which, granted, is my entire brand. The official picture, drawn from data gathered by the Office for National Statistics and the work of housing charities like Shelter, describes a rental market in which prices have climbed relentlessly, supply has shrivelled, and tenants have been left with almost no power and even less hope. The average rent now consumes a portion of income that would have seemed like a satirical exaggeration a decade ago. We are not imagining it. It really is this bad.

The strange pride of the survivor

And yet, here is the thing that fascinates me as a chronicler of this city’s particular madness: we have turned it into a personality. Surviving the London rental market has become a badge of honour, a thing we compare like war wounds. “Oh, you pay how much? That’s nothing, I once lived in a converted cupboard above a kebab shop and shared a bathroom with a man who only spoke in riddles.” We swap horror stories with the grim delight of veterans, because the alternative to laughing is despair, and despair is not, as far as I know, tax-deductible.

There is a dark comedy in it, the way an entire generation has been so thoroughly defeated by the housing market that we have absorbed the defeat into our sense of self. We are not tenants. We are survivors. We have stories. We have a heightened appreciation for the simple miracle of a flat with no visible damp and a landlord who returns calls. We have, in short, made a personality out of a crisis, because what else is there to do.

The serious bit, before the mould reaches the ceiling

But I do not want to dress this up too prettily, because the rental crisis is not a charming quirk of London life. It is a genuine emergency that is hollowing out the city, driving away the people who cannot keep up, trapping others in insecure, expensive, sometimes dangerous housing, and stealing from a whole generation the basic security that ought to underpin a decent life. The bidding wars and the magic mould are funny until you remember that behind every one of them is a person being slowly priced out of their own city.

And yet I will go to the next viewing

Because what choice do I have. I will put on my best non-desperate face, I will not mention the mould, I will compliment the landlord’s questionable taste in laminate flooring, and I will, if it comes to it, bid against twenty strangers for a box with a brick-wall view. Renting in London is a personality now, and mine, apparently, is “resilient, mildly traumatised, and looking for a one-bed under fifteen hundred a month, which does not exist.” Wish me luck. I will need it, and a strong cup of something, and possibly an exorcist for the mould.

The power that tenants do not have

The deepest absurdity of the rental market is the sheer imbalance of power it runs on. The tenant, desperate and out-bid, has almost no leverage, while the landlord holds every card, and the law, for all the recent talk of reform, still leaves renters startlingly exposed to eviction, neglect, and relentless rent rises. We laugh about the mould and the bidding wars because laughing is free, but the underlying truth is that an entire generation has been handed insecurity as a permanent condition and told to be grateful for the privilege of paying for it. That is not a quirk of city living. It is a structural failure, and it deserves to be named as one between the jokes.

For more housing-market horror, the team enjoys NewsThump, viewing by appointment only.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/