Fancy living in London? Well, unless you’re rich, your parents are rich, you’ve already got a home here, or can forego a living room/living anywhere near public transport links, you’re in trouble. Because London rents are a record 108% higher than the rest of the UK.
The average rent is £1,560 a month, and that’s compared with a UK average of £749 a month. And there might be little use scurrying away to somewhere else in the Home Counties and commuting in – train prices blow, as does the fact that the south east is the second most expensive UK area to rent in, with an average price of £944.
According to Homelet, reports The Telegraph, the cheapest place to rent is the North East, with an average price of £536.
Anyway, while George Osborne announces that Victorian-built prisons on ‘prime real estate’ will be pulled down to make way for potential housing developments, there are other enterprising sorts looking to provide solutions to the housing/rental crisis.
Like, for instance, this guy renting out a room in his five-bed house for a ‘female student’ for the bargain of £1 a month!
The proposition, posted by an anonymous man to EasyRoomMate.com, came with a catch. The chosen girl would have to sleep in his bedroom – not any of the other four – because he’s scared of sleeping alone.
‘I am renting another bed in my spacious en-suite bedroom for free due to autophobia, which is a fear of being and sleeping alone. The house has a lovely living room and garden as well as a gym and four bathrooms. The tenant must be single female, clean, organised and sociable.
‘Contact me for more details and to arrange a viewing.’
Autophobia, textbook definition, knows no gender. But this guy seems to specifically want a woman – and a young woman at that. And there’s no amount of bricks and mortar that could shelter us from the stench of that bullshit.
Albin Serviant, CEO of EasyRoommate (the name seems funny now we read it again), told The Mirror: ‘We believe that flat-sharing can be a wonderful experience, given the right conditions.
‘Because we don’t want to leave it to chance, we have a dedicated moderation team working around the clock to insure the advertised flats are genuine. As a word of advice, if it’s too good to be true, then it probably is.’
Luckily, this room advert just sounds too creepy to be legit.
Like this? You might also be interested in:
Is This A Prison Or A Flat? It Shouldn’t Be That Hard To Tell
We Tried To Rent A Two-Bed In London And This Is What Happened
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.