“I am from Manchester but have been living in London for the past six years. I am an IT engineer at a renowned London company, where I’ve been employed for the last three years. When I’m not at work, I enjoy long walks in Hyde Park with my family.”
It sounds like a dating app profile, but this is a sample “tenant CV” – the latest example of the extreme lengths renters are going to in order to secure a private rental in the UK in 2023.
Not long ago, before the Covid pandemic, finding private rented accommodation was fairly simple. If you could afford the rent, you would get the keys.
Not any more. With the average rental property prompting 25 inquiries to letting agents – more than triple the eight they were receiving in pre-pandemic 2019, according to Rightmove – renters are being asked to jump through what Shelter’s chief executive describes as “ridiculous hoops” in the bunfight of wills and wallets that is the UK’s rental market.
“For many, house-hunting is now akin to a Battle Royale experience, with the losers being denied a home altogether,” said Nick Ballard, the head organiser at the community union, Acorn.
This is not just a London thing. Bidding wars are now commonplace in cities including Manchester and Bristol, with dozens of prospective tenants asked to submit sealed bids. The “winner” has often bid hundreds of pounds more than the advertised price, and may have offered to pay as much as 12 months’ rent in advance – a demand previously only made of tenants new to the UK, particularly international students.
Rental CVs – an American invention – are becoming more common, where desperate tenants sell themselves and their pets to potential landlords. For those lacking the design skills, templates are available to buy online from Etsy.
Others are asked for photographs, or given tenancy agreements which ban overnight visitors without prior consent, in effect giving landlords control over a tenant’s sex life.
Renters say their behaviour is monitored ever more closely when they move in, with some landlords controlling their heating remotely via apps, and others demanding washing is dried outside in all weathers.
Housing experts have noticed increasing anger from landlords towards their tenants as the government moves closer to banning no-fault evictions and bringing in legislation to compel landlords to fix mould and damp in their properties after the death of two-year-old Awaab Ishaq in Rochdale.
One landlord in Liverpool told his student tenants they could only cook meals that took under 20 minutes, said Abi O’Connor, a postgraduate researcher from Liverpool University specialising in housing.
“A student was complaining about condensation on the walls and rising damp and the landlord said they needed to have the windows open, even when it was raining, and could only cook for 20 minutes at a time,” she said.
A renter in Trafford, Greater Manchester, said he called the police after his landlord punched him during a tussle over a clothes horse in the front room (the landlord thought washing should be dried outside despite the notoriously damp Mancunian climate).
O’Connor said she was concerned about a “backlash from the landlords, and the anger towards tenants … even now, people asking for the basics is seen as reactionary, tenants taking too much control, militant people who need to be squashed”.
Landlords can afford to be ever pickier as the number of unique tenants looking to move across Great Britain is 41% higher than in 2019, says Rightmove, while the number of properties available to rent is down by 35%.
This year the Observer revealed that one London letting agent asked a group of prospective tenants to each send a photo of themselves and a short profile along with their application to rent a property in north London.
When challenged about the need for a photo, Kinleigh Folkard & Hayward (KFH) said: “We ask for photos to help landlords form a connection with the prospective tenants – otherwise it would just be names on paper to them.”
But KFH’s group lettings director, Carol Pawsey, said while in a busy rental market it was “not uncommon” to provide landlords with personal biographies “to help them decide between multiple competitive offers”, letting agents should not ask for photos and it was not company policy to request any which were not relevant to the application.
Rob Dix, the co-founder of Property Hub, said he had noticed more offers to pay a year’s rent upfront: “Not always as a landlord demand, but as a way of standing out and securing somewhere to live among intense competition.”
More tenants are being asked to provide a guarantor who will step in to meet any missed payments if the tenants do not have an annual salary of 30 times the monthly rent or more. Some letting agents will insist a guarantor is a homeowner, and they must usually have good credit history and income or savings above a certain amount.
“Requirements such as character references and the ability to pay multiple months’ rent upfront discriminate in favour of the more affluent tenants, and serve only to benefit landlords,” said Ballard.
Some renters are fighting back. In Bristol last year, campaigners from Acorn persuaded 23 letting agents in the city to stop asking for sealed bids.
Elsewhere, the advertised rent is merely a starting point, says Ben Clay from Greater Manchester Tenants Union. “The big thing in Manchester at the moment is coming out of a viewing and seeing 10, 15, sometimes 20 other people outside, and then the letting agents hold an auction to see who will pay most.”
Benefit claimants have it particularly tough in this cut-throat market. Rents in some parts of Greater Manchester are rising by as much as 38% annually, yet the Local Housing Allowance, which sets the benefit rates people can access for private rents, remains frozen at 2018-19 rent levels.
Polly Neate, the chief executive of Shelter, said: “Private renting is at boiling point. Tenants are being pitted against each other for over-priced and often shoddy rentals and the barriers to finding and keeping a safe home are only getting higher.
“Every day we hear from people being asked to jump through ridiculous hoops to secure a new rental – whether that’s huge sums of rent upfront, guarantors with excessive conditions, no kids policies or unlawful ‘no benefits’ bans.”
