Prepared references, a personal cover letter, and a viewing slot booked three weeks in advance. Welcome to renting in one of London’s most competitive postcodes.
A friend of a friend agreed to let me tag along on a flat viewing in Shoreditch recently, purely so I could see, firsthand, exactly how competitive renting in this postcode has actually become, and I will admit I went in expecting the usual grumbling about high prices rather than what I actually witnessed, which was closer to watching someone prepare for a fairly serious job interview than a simple flat viewing. She had brought printed references, a short written note about her employment and lifestyle addressed directly to the landlord, and had booked her specific fifteen-minute viewing slot online three weeks in advance, competing against what the letting agent casually mentioned was a waiting list of over forty other prospective tenants for the same one-bedroom flat.
Forty applicants, for a fairly ordinary one-bedroom conversion above a shop on a street that, ten years ago, would not have drawn a fraction of that interest. That number alone tells you most of what you need to know about where this neighbourhood’s rental market currently sits, but the specific texture of the competition, the printed references, the personal cover note, the sense of genuinely auditioning for the right to hand over your money every month, struck me as a meaningfully different phenomenon than simple high prices on their own would produce.
What has changed, from conversations with several local letting agents over the past few months, is not simply that more people want to live here, though that is certainly true, but that the pool of available flats has not kept pace with that demand at anything close to the rate needed to ease the resulting pressure. New residential development, including the affordable-tenure units promised under the wider Future Shoreditch plan I have covered elsewhere on this site, remains years away from actually delivering meaningful new supply, leaving the existing, largely converted industrial and Victorian housing stock to absorb demand that has, by most measures, grown considerably faster than the neighbourhood’s physical capacity to house it.
The letting agent running the viewing I sat in on, who has worked this specific patch for the better part of a decade, told me candidly that this level of competition for an entirely ordinary, unremarkable flat has become the norm rather than the exception over roughly the past eighteen months, a shift she attributed partly to the area’s continued cultural cachet and partly, more specifically, to renters who have been priced out of neighbouring postcodes entirely and are now competing for exactly the same limited stock everyone already living here is also fighting over.
My friend, for what it is worth, did not get the flat. Neither, presumably, did the other thirty-nine applicants. Somewhere in this neighbourhood, a landlord is currently reviewing a stack of printed references and personal cover letters for a single one-bedroom conversion, and whoever they eventually choose will have, in a very real sense, won a competitive selection process most job applicants would recognise immediately. That is not a healthy way for a housing market to function, whatever the underlying causes, and it is a story this column intends to keep returning to for as long as the waiting lists keep growing rather than shrinking.
More from this author at Harper-Thames, prat.uk.