Renting a room for £500 per month in a well-maintained period property in Zone 2? There there, dearie, put down the skinny jeans: you have not entered a portal back to London c. 2002.
You've probably just met someone renting off a property fairy godmother, one who dispenses great deals on comfortable lodgings to the nice, middle-class young things propping up London's low-wage jobs market.
I know several of these young benefactors. Hell, I'm even friends with some of them, and with several people who've accepted their hospitality in the form of a nauseatingly generous rental contract.
The relationship between the godmothers and their Cinderellas, however, is not quite so balanced as the equal weighting of the term "housemates" suggests.
A number of friends and friends-of-friends are lucky enough to have been bought houses by their parents, with the idea that they rent the other bedrooms out to friends either to cover the mortgage or to subsidise their own lives.
They come in all shapes and sizes: some of them work for a pittance. Some do not work at all. Some have high-powered careers.
Either way, the setup leads to a social scene rife with plotting, subterfuge and fallouts as friends compete for one of these coveted spots.
After all, it's easy to lampoon the trustafarians who've been gifted the golden keys to the city at such a tender age.
But when you've heard the countless horror stories of the London rental market, with summary evictions, black mould left undealt with, rampant rent rises and aggressive emails from landlords who still want to be perceived as the nice guy, is a bit of deceit about where your deposit really came from such a crime, when you can offer your friends cheap rent in a nice house?
Most of them don't even bother to hide the source of their funds. And why should they?
A quick survey of my friends who’ve enjoyed such an arrangement are near unanimous in praise. It’s like living with a benefactor, they say, only it’s not an Abel Magwitch-style figure as in Great Expectations but rather someone whose hair they've probably held back after one too many.
Lest we forget, the average room rent in London currently stands at £993 a month — and even more in fashionable or convenient areas. Is it any wonder that competition for a room at the inn is fierce?
A fellow eyewitness has likened the contest to “that Gossip Girl episode where Blair creates a parkour for her would-be bridesmaids to select the top-performing three for her wedding to the Prince of Monaco.”
Loyalists sharpen their elbows and jostle for space – the reward of paying half of what they’d otherwise have to pay for a hovel on Holloway Road too enticing to pass up.
Some forged alliances (“we come as a pair”); others badmouthed whoever they perceived as rivals (“remember when she kissed your boyfriend in Year 9?”).
Those lucky enough to get their initials inscribed on the nameplate then had to face the grim reality of where they sat in the pecking order of the house. Were they lucky enough to get into the pad on Malvern Road, but only got the attic room? The one where they have to go down one floor to get to the loo?
“It’s sort of a valedictory slap in the face,” says a friend who went through the process. (Oh, the tiny violins.)
Of course, living with one’s mates doesn’t always go to plan. People get territorial; they have different standards of cleanliness.
One housemate’s kefir exploded all over a priceless artwork belonging to his landlord’s father
Some of the first-time homeowners take their newfound status very seriously, asking everyone to chip in for a cleaner or take their shoes off before going upstairs.
Others are more relaxed, having gone straight from university halls to a four-bedroom house in Shoreditch or Shepherd’s Bush and never quite shrugged off the student proclivities for all things shabby-chic.
Their houses have the same accoutrements as those which most families have spent decades building towards (double bedrooms, kitchen islands, a roof terrace) but they’re messy and unkempt. Parties run fast and loose.
This can be a problem. Even if housemates move in with a similar value system (Sex! Drugs! Rock And Roll!), the twenties are a make-or-break time. Some get coupled up. Others hang up their dancing shoes. People might be on very different salaries, working totally different jobs, or find the lifestyle to which they’re attracted begins to differ vastly from those they’re living with.
These are classic points of contention. But the wealth in some of these households makes for uniquely hilarious anecdotes.
I heard of one housemate whose kefir exploded all over a priceless artwork belonging to his landlord’s father.
In another home, the landlady has decided to paint the entire kitchen in teal and bought matching cutlery to boot. It’s become a running gag among friends to ask the housemates, off the record, how the teal kitchen is doing.
Even in homes where people see eye to eye, clashes can occur. Those who agree to live as a four are, typically, the sociable type.
What happens, though, when two of them want to host a dinner party on the same night and joining forces just isn’t possible – because they both have far too many friends and it would get political, because Ellie hates Katrina and Atticus ghosted Maddie after they slept together that one time? It would never work.
Sometimes the landlord will have a partner nobody likes. Sometimes, a landlord and a tenant will start shagging. Sometimes a tenant’s partner will overstay their welcome.
The arrangement typically lasts for two years before housemates move on. This tends to work out well for the friendlords, who are usually happy to rotate their tenants every few years so they get a chance to live with everyone they love most.
Sometimes, however, a tenant won’t heed the warning. A friend in Hackney who owns her flat tells me of a recent tenant who began as a friendly acquaintance but whom she quickly became embattled with. “It would be really difficult to get her to follow the cleaning rota or take out the bins without me becoming passive aggressive,” she says.
She noticed the tenant felt “inherent resentment towards me as a landlady of the same age”, and once shoved past her in the doorway when taking out a bin she’d left to pile up for days.
My friend tells me she now only moves in friends who work the sort of jobs where responsibility and hierarchy are valued. Lawyers, she says, are a dream – and are less likely to harbour any kind of financial resentment since they themselves are earning a very handsome living.
Do the young homeowners ever feel like their friends are getting an easy ride? “I definitely felt like one of them took advantage,” says a friend who bought a flat in east London two years ago. “I felt like I was expected to be not just a landlady but also a mother.”
A friend of hers moved in expecting help with unpacking and hanging pictures in her new bedroom. When your tenant is also your pal, it can be hard to create boundaries.
Do the housemates, in turn, ever feel that their landlord is just a privileged ninny a la Dickie Greenleaf? It’s a tempting narrative, but I’ve yet to find anyone who will admit to feeling that way.
Any resentment a tenant might have towards a young landlord rarely tips into a critique of the inheritocracy, perhaps for fear of biting the hand that feeds in a system that has ultimately benefited them, too.
So if you can bag a room at the inn, do. Just make sure to take the bins out.
