Last summer I spent three months working as a lettings agent in London. I was waiting for my graduate scheme to begin in September, a Masters had left me broke and the job came through a friend of a friend. If I'm honest it seemed like easy money and, initially, an enjoyable way of earning it: showing people around posh flats in Marylebone and the West End.
I pitched up at the tiny Fitzrovia office and set about learning the tricks of the trade, the naughtiest of which was definitely what’s known as creating ‘a lead’.
It worked like this: you had a flat in a particular area that was attracting no interest so you wrote a description of a similar flat in the same area, used a generic picture from Google Maps, added ‘more photos to come’ and marketed it at a low price. Of course, this flat did not actually exist.
When people contacted you about the imaginary flat because they knew a good deal when they saw one, you explained that unfortunately that flat had just been taken, but you did have one very like it, in the same area, the rent was a little more but negotiable… You booked them in to view the flat that nobody was interested in and, hey presto, you had created interest.
Trickery was an essential part of the job. I checked BBC Weather updates for the sunniest times of day to show our dingy basement flats. I learnt the buzzwords: spacious; competitive market; outside space, and if all else failed, the buzziest word of all: London.
London was how you explained everything. High rents? Hello, it’s London. Titchy space? Yes, but this is London. Fierce competition for shitty, overpriced flats? What the hell else would you expect in London?
And despite the deceit and the vague suspicion that some of it wasn’t, you know, legal, I’ll level with you: being a lettings agent was actually a hell of a lot of fun…at first.
There was the student who insisted on picking me up from the office in his Ferrari - a different Ferrari each of the three times I met him, I kid you not - and driving me to viewings which were a minute walk away.
He explained that he was looking for a flat in Marylebone instead of Knightsbridge because he wanted ‘to keep real and be humble’. Sadly, his dedication to reality and humility wavered and the last I heard from him was in an email asking if I could show him flats in Sloane Square.
Then there was the ongoing saga of a Nigerian politician’s daughter, who had failed to pay rent for six months and her landlord had only just noticed the five grand missing from his account. Let’s call her Lulu*, she became our enthralling anti-hero.
She had managed to get her university lecturer to act as her guarantor which meant that if for whatever reason she was unable to pay the rent he would be forced to cough up. Whether this lecturer had been incredibly foolish or if their relationship had gone beyond the student-teacher dynamic was endlessly discussed in the office. Either way, the poor man was now liable to pay the entire £5,000 plus interest and his frantic calls to my colleague Gemma became a daily event.
Lulu earned our admiration through her sheer brazen ballsiness. She would telephone crying, mention mysterious ‘family problems’, promise to pay the money by a certain date and we would watch powerlessly as the date came and went with no transfer. In one particularly memorable excuse, she emailed Gemma to explain that her bank had frozen her account. She attached ‘the letter from the bank’. It was a word document with no masthead, no date and the bank’s name was nowhere on it. In fact, it was signed off, ‘Yours sincerely, The Bank’.
‘She must think we’re fucking stupid,’ Gemma spluttered.
When I left the landlord was instructing a solicitor having eventually come to the conclusion that Lulu had no intention of paying her rent and now, safely back in Nigeria, there was fuck all that could be done to force her to. She was the only tenant to take on the agency and somehow emerge victoriously.
The job sometimes crossed into a murky area beyond trickery. For checking references – which basically involved no more than photocopying a passport and emailing a tenant’s boss and previous landlord for a reference - we charged £300. Renewing contracts - we had to change the date on the old contract and resend - was £150. A bargain if ever I saw one!
By far the worst of our fees was the holding deposit of six weeks’ rent which each new tenant had to pay. The term ‘deposit’ implied the chunk of money would be returned, but a holding deposit was never repaid. It went straight into the agency’s coffers. Attempting to justify this colossal fee to flummoxed tenants was excruciating, it’s also technically completely illegal…
One Friday evening I showed an accountant who worked in Angel a one bedroom flat in Old Street that I was desperate to unload. Let’s call her Petra. I had high hopes that Petra would take it. She didn’t ask about the damp in the bathroom, the titchy kitchen or the noise from the bar below. I was feeling buoyant when she started saying ‘we’, so I asked:
‘Will you be living with your boyfriend, or husband, or…’
She explained she would be living with her son, seven, and daughter, two, and my heart sank. I knew the landlord would never agree to it.
‘But where will they sleep?’
‘They like to sleep with me so we’ll bring my bed.’ She nodded. ‘I’ll take it. What do I have to pay?’
‘I can email it over in the morning,’ I fudged.
She insisted we work it out so I began doing the sums. With the holding deposit, the rent in advance, the admin fee, it was all in £4,500.
‘But what is a holding deposit?’ Petra asked.
I began deploying the buzzwords and finished by yelping: 'London!!!'
She obstinately (and quite rightly) would not buy my bullshit and kept asking straightforward questions that I could not answer. I gave up and told the truth.
‘I’m sorry. I can’t tell my boss you’ll take the flat but you won’t pay the holding deposit.’
It was horrible and as I watched her walk away along the grubby road to Old Street station, this lark of a summer job suddenly didn’t seem so fun.
My friends and I moan about the London housing crisis because we can’t buy flats in Clapham or Stoke Newington, as our parents could, and we don't live like the characters in Four Weddings And A Funeral, Notting Hill or, even, Bridget Jones.
And that’s all very sad. But, being faced with a seven-year-old boy sleeping in the same bed as his mother and toddler sister put all of that into perspective for me. These are the people hit hardest by the housing crisis, suffering because of the extortionate prices, the dodgy practices and the lack of security and stability.
Worse still, agents and landlords up and down the country but especially in London benefit while these people suffer. They reap the rewards of our broken housing market and make hay while people in search of a home for themselves and their family have no choice but to agree to their outlandish terms.
Soon after the viewing with Petra, my graduate scheme began and my short-lived career as a lettings agent came to an end. I learnt a lot in those three months: confidence, the art of the spiel and, I’m afraid, that the landlord and his agent almost always win.
** All names have been changed*
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.