Londoners: Finding a Flat?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I have a friend living in London who’s been searching for a flat over the last two or three weeks. She says that she keeps scheduling a viewing, just to have the realtor call a few hours before it’s time to go look and say that the place has been taken. If she goes to a realtor’s office they don’t have any place to take her out to see. Of something like 15 places that she’s been scheduled to see, I think she’s only seen maybe 3.

Is there some trick to this? She’s hoping to find something that is not a bad commute in to Liverpool Station.

2

From having done some house-hunting in London, and dreading the prospect of doing it again, I’d say that the power of instant decision is key. If you find something you like, you need to leap on it, because the chances are you won’t get a second look. Sign up with as many estate agents as possible, and be prepared to invest some time into looking for things.

Broadening the area in which she’s looking might also help; does she want to live around Liverpool Street Station, or somewhere that she can commute into there by train?

3

By train.

Are Londoners just not greedy? It seems like if you can just find a tenant for a flat at the drop of a hat that you would raise the rental fee. Is there some sort of government price fiddling in effect?

4

Sadly no government price fiddling - it might not be so painfully expensive to live here, if there were! I’ve just found a flat in London and it’s been a pain in the arse looking, so I feel for your friend…

I think turnover of tenants is quite high in London - people tend to move around a lot, whether for work or studies, or just because they feel like it, I think (though that might just be people I know…) - and Dervorin is right, she needs to be able to pay a holding deposit on somewhere then and there if she likes it (and is going through an agency), or commit instantly if she’s doing it through a private landlord. Otherwise someone else will, and she’ll lose out.

I found Streets Ahead were really proactive in calling me with details of flats and arranging viewings for me, though their agency fees are a bit steep (at least, compared to other English agencies; I was moving from France where the standard is a full month’s rent, so cheap in comparison to that!) - I ended up taking a flat with a private landlord that I found on Gumtree, though, just because I could move in instantly.

In fact, I think I’ve found all my flats in the UK on Gumtree, though there are now a much higher number of scam postings than I remember there being a couple of years ago, so if she goes that route, she should remember to run a mile from anyone who even mentions the words Western Union, no matter how nice they otherwise seem. (I should have known, really, from the low price and lovely flats - but they weren’t that low a price that they automatically pinged my radar as scams. At least, not the first couple of times - after that, they were more obvious. I’m clearly a bit slow :stuck_out_tongue: )

Liverpool St is the wrong side of London for me, so I know nothing about what areas might work for her - but if she looks along the major commuter lines, starting in about Zone 3 or 4 and moving outwards she should find something that’s a fairly reasonable balance between price and travel time. (Unless she’s paid a fortune, in which case, she needn’t wait til Zone 3.)