My London OE: How finding somewhere to live is 'insanity'

Esther Dawson, a Kiwi living in London, on her bizarre (and seemingly never ending) search for a London rental.

It was the hottest day of summer so far and I’d just sat down in someone’s recently vacated and extremely warm seat. The Tube was packed and I was hungry and grumpy and needed the bathroom. Hungry because it was lunchtime and my 10am bagel didn’t cut it.

Grumpy because the estate agent didn’t show up to our midday viewing. The property was located 40 minutes from my office, and I’d run, panting between stations because I was late and didn’t want to give a bad first impression. In the end it didn’t matter, because the agent never appeared. I needed the bathroom because I have poor time management skills. That last one was on me.

My partner and I had been searching for a rental in London on-and-off for the past couple of months. We were the lucky ones because we both had jobs and a place to stay in the meantime – with family – but the lack of a deadline did very little to temper the personal impact felt from our truly bizarre and never ending search for a place to call home.

We really liked the first house we viewed, which felt like a sign, so we made an offer. A combination of early naivety and my tendency to believe that I’m a lucky person resulted in us feeling pretty confident that we would bag the place. Instead, we were treated to the cold, harsh reality of the highly-unethical but regularly-practised ‘bidding war’ in London, whereby the price listed for the property online is definitely not the price it will go for.

Here’s how it works.

You make an offer. Usually matching the price that’s on the listing because, well, that’s the price on the listing, right? Then the estate agent calls you back with the option of submitting your best and final offer because surprise, surprise, in a city of nine million people they’ve received more than just yours.

If you’re lucky, the agent will dial up the transparency by telling you that someone else has made an offer higher than yours. They won’t tell you what that offer is though, so your new price is a real stab in the dark. It’s really quite surprising how, despite having no evidence as to what you’re competing against, you’ll try to psychically read your unknown opponent’s intentions anyway.

This process has been illegal in my homeland of New Zealand since 2021 and, just weeks ago, the UK made it illegal under the government’s revolutionary new Renters’ Rights Bill recently passed as law.

Touted as the “biggest shake-up to renting in England for more than 30 years” (BBC), this bill will legally prevent landlords from accepting a rate higher than the listed asking price. This wasn’t the case back when we were looking however, so let’s return to my sob story and you’ll soon understand why this bill is so necessary and, some might say, 30 years too late.

Following the encouragement of our beady-eyed estate agent, we upped our offer on that first house by £100 ($230) a month, maxing out our budget completely. “But the kitchen is so nice and the living room so airy,” we reasoned. That didn’t matter, the faceless bidder still offered more. I realised quite quickly that if there’s one thing that’ll sway a landlord, it’s more money–personality of the tenant, communication style, and references be damned!

In New Zealand, where we’ve rented in the past, a personal letter can make a huge difference to the success of your application. The last house we rented, the landlord offered it to us on the spot. He’d read our personal bios, liked us, and appreciated the reference letter from our previous landlord. No one else had done that, he’d said.

In London, they’ll take an extra £50 a month over your letter of recommendation any day.

Still novices in our house-hunting journey, we remained hopeful that the next place might be the one. You would be right to suspect from my thinly veiled foreshadowing that this was not to be the case. What followed instead was a series of sad, sad viewings that left us extremely despondent. On the upside, we learnt what we liked, or rather, what we definitely did not like.

We saw a listing for a studio where the front door was actually just a large window. One top-floor apartment featured a very obvious slanting floor, upon which the bed was placed. “What do you think,” the estate agent asked? “Um, the kitchen’s nice,” I muttered weakly.

Perhaps my Kiwi nature prevented me from naming the big fat elephant in the room, but needless to say, we didn’t make an offer. We viewed a great number of boxy, soulless apartments with extremely grey carpets and very small windows. We started wondering if we’d set our budget too low, or our expectations too high. Probably both.

To hammer home the insanity of this market: the price to rent a one bed apartment in London is the same price you would pay for a four bedroom free-standing house in Auckland. Add council tax, water, heating and power on top and you’re paying an additional £300 or more on your monthly rent. At some point, we decided that we’d add studios to our search filters in hopes of lowering the cost.

And then we saw her. The apartment of our dreams.

Housed in an old textile warehouse that was first converted to artist quarters in the 80s and then later into residential apartments, this eight-metre-long studio loft featured a very large steel crittall window. Think the Friends’ apartment in New York, but far less insulated.

A kitchen and tiny bathroom took up one end, and a raised platform for a bed took up the other. An expanse of hardwood flooring linked the two. We imagined a cosy lounge, art on the walls, long sash curtains, fresh flowers every week. Needless to say, we submitted our application immediately and called off all other viewings. This was the first place we had really loved. Our fingers and toes were crossed.

Two agonising weeks passed. We imagined our lives in that apartment. Dinner parties, cocktail nights. Mood lighting and plants everywhere. I became an artist, because what else could one become in a home like that? But we’d made a mistake. When the inevitable call came that we hadn’t got the place, we were devastated.

Emptied out for a couple of days, we took some time before getting back on the house-hunting horse. The blow was somewhat softened by the discovery that we’d missed out because another viewer had offered to buy the property. Fair enough. Might’ve done the same if we could.

Our first true heartbreak stung, but it didn’t last. We embraced our practical side and called it a game of numbers. Upped the viewings, and dove back in.

That bidding war kicked our ass a few more times. A Hackney one-bed we really liked went for £250 more a month than it was listed for. In an oppositional twist of fate, we missed out on a tiny studio room in the treetops of London Fields because the owner thought it was better suited to one person. OK, but why did you let us view it then? So many questions. So few answers.

Then, one afternoon we secured the final viewing available for a lovely little house on a Hackney back street. The perfect spot, but I'd arrived late because I'd hopped off my train one stop too early. Furiously nabbing a Lime bike in my eagerness to get there on time, I almost stumbled over my own feet at the door.

Despite my awkward arrival, the friendly landlord and departing tenant kindly showed me around. The kitchen was tiny, but the way the dappled light filtered through the bay windows was so calming. The tenant told us that she was sad to leave and had found it a “haven” amidst London’s chaos. My partner and I looked at each other and nodded.

There was something right about this. We felt strangely connected to the place and I had the kind of knowing that hasn’t let me down before - eerily similar to that innate feeling of luck which definitely let me down two months earlier.

The friendly landlord urged us to apply immediately because he was going to make a decision that same night. We spent a stressful 30 minutes on the Tube sending in our application and paying the deposit. “All worth it though,” we agreed. The next morning we were refunded the deposit with a copy-and-paste message to say we hadn’t got the place.

That one hurt way more than expected. My partner and I went away for a while to lick our wounds. Or, more accurately, spent four delightful days in Amsterdam (don’t feel too sorry for us). We came back ready to kick ass, deciding to only view places we thought we would love, and hopefully put in a lot of offers.

Then it happened. Our first acceptance! A place we’d briefly viewed earlier that day. As I strode home from the station I tried to drum up some excitement. This is good, I told myself, We have a place… albeit not exactly in the location we wanted… and on a main road… and we only saw it for a few minutes… but it has a balcony and a separate kitchen (that seemed important at the time)... I think we can make it work.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one trying to manufacture positive feelings. Cue a night of anxiety as my partner and I realised we couldn’t say yes. I made the tail-between-my-legs call. Thankfully they were very nice and refunded our deposit.

It had been more than two months looking and we were still no closer to finding somewhere to live. We ate dinner in the park that night and I felt my hope slipping that we would ever find somewhere we liked and could afford.

A few weeks passed and our never ending search yielded some more interesting discoveries. I learnt what a Juliet balcony was. One time after a viewing, we passed a casual Banksy sheltered behind a pane of perspex on the side of an inconsequential building. We were one of 35 viewers in a single day for an apartment that looked out onto a busy pub and noisy street. The mind boggles.

By this point, my partner and I were old hands and would often meet mid-workday for viewings in random suburbs. One day, moments before showing up to our viewing, the estate agent called telling us to come straight up the stairs once we got there. Upon arriving at the front door however, there was a man physically guarding the entrance.

After a few confused minutes of back-and-forth, it became clear that he wasn’t the man on the phone at all and was from a completely different agency altogether. He’d just been shafted by his competitor upstairs who’d conducted a viewing for a couple who apparently “weren’t his”, and was now rigorously policing the doorway to make sure it didn’t happen again. I had absolutely no time for his drama and pushed past to claim my rightful viewing.

Alas, the place was dismal. The floorboards had great big gaps between them. After asking the agent - another beady-eyed character - if this might affect the apartment’s insulation, he paused awkwardly and then gestured to a cupboard door, “Have you seen the extra storage?” I had. Clear deflection. The vibes were off. We left shortly after and did not look back.

More than three months had now passed. But at the start of July last year, we finally found two places we really loved. One of them - get this - was a studio in the very same converted warehouse that had caused us heartbreak two months earlier. Nothing like returning to your first love.

It took two weeks before we could secure a viewing for either apartment, but within two days we had seen both and made offers. The real estate agent from the warehouse studio remembered us and promised to put our offer forward first to increase our chances. Unethical? Probably. Did we take him up on it? Obviously.

On Monday we had answers about both apartments. The first was another submit your best and final offer (no thanks!). The other, praise be, was a letter of acceptance to rent the studio in our beloved warehouse apartment. We only had two weeks to move in, but boy were we ready. Positioned very close to Regent’s Canal and surrounded by vibrant shops and cafes, we were so excited to live in a neighbourhood we knew we would love.

The move went smoothly, but the weeks following were challenging. The studio apartment was unfurnished and in typical London fashion, we moved in less than 12 hours after the previous tenants had vacated. The place had not been cleaned - at all. There was cat litter in the cracks of the wooden flooring, the bathroom was all smudgy, the fridge full of ice, and the building manager couldn’t get a cleaner in until the following day. We mopped a square of the grimy floor, set up our camping mattresses, and slept terribly.

For the next week our furniture consisted of two wooden pallets we dragged in from the side of the road, a stool we filched from the shared balcony, and an Ikea mattress that lived on the floor. In those same first days the kitchen sink blocked up, a strange smell started emanating from the shower, and we discovered that the extractor fan above the hob was venting straight into our room.

Three months in and we’re still toasting our bread in the oven and boiling water on the stove. We hang our washing to dry on coat hangers slung over a pipe that hangs from the ceiling. We even have our very own stalactite (don’t ask). Ten of our window panes are cracked, and every time our neighbour on the left sneezes, I can hear him quite distinctly.

That’s largely because of the locked door between our apartments which is taped over but definitely not sound-proof. Oh, and several of our parcels have been stolen by tailgaters who get into the apartment by following behind a courier. I accidentally accused my neighbour of being one, which did not go down well at all.

But almost nothing can take away from the sweet delight of sitting here nestled in the corner of our eBay couch, writing this article while sipping hot peppermint tea from a mug that my partner ‘borrowed’ from work.

I’ve learnt that London can do this to you - grind you down and then lift you up again victoriously just at the point when you’ve almost, but not quite, had enough.

If there’s one thing left to say, it’s simply this: I hope to god that the Renters' Rights Bill makes a difference because the absolute rigmarole of renting in London is a laugh in the face of common decency.

You can read more of Esther's writing on her Substack, It Came to Me on the Tube