{"id":114337,"date":"2026-08-31T11:02:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T11:02:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/114337\/"},"modified":"2026-08-31T11:02:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T11:02:11","slug":"i-started-my-first-london-house-hunt-full-of-optimism-that-didnt-last-long","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/114337\/","title":{"rendered":"I started my first London house hunt full of optimism \u2013 that didn\u2019t last long"},"content":{"rendered":"

I feared that I might never find housing when navigating the confusing and frustrating renters’ system\"A<\/p>\n

A general view of residential housing in London (Image: Victoria Jones\/PA Wire)<\/p>\n

I\u2019d heard all the warnings about London\u2019s rental market. Friends told me it was competitive, expensive and, at times, downright frustrating. But this was my first time house hunting in the capital, and I was feeling optimistic. How hard could it really be?<\/p>\n

I was about to find out.<\/p>\n

Throughout the process, I was optimistic and looking at all ranges of prices, areas and housing situations, yet one thing always stuck out: how unbelievably apathetic the people were who were advertising these properties were.<\/p>\n

Either they lacked integral communication skills or they just chose to offer a completely different property to the one you enquired about.<\/p>\n

I would repeatedly type out the same things over and over again, from my name, my occupation and my budget to the fact that I was looking for two rooms not one, before another AI bot on Spareroom would simply respond: “I think I have what you are looking for?” and that would be a room wildly out of budget, cramped and such a distance away from London that if I moved there I might as well have stayed in my home town of Nottingham.<\/p>\n

Yet when you get past the endless messages of AI chatbots filling your Spareroom <\/a>and Facebook Messenger inboxes and get to the real people, the real landlords, then it is a whole other world. Then finally, we get to the viewings, they seemed like a myth, something that people would utter when talking about house hunting, but never seemed to materialise.<\/p>\n

But this meant trudging to areas far and wide just to awkwardly peek around an HMO <\/a>for half an hour before heading to an identical one around the corner, owned by the same person.<\/p>\n

They almost always ended with my friend and me waiting for our tour guide to turn their eyes away before we shook our heads at each other behind their backs and silently consented to dropping a hard “no”.<\/p>\n

This became far too routine throughout our search.<\/p>\n

After a few unlucky weeks of arduous virtual viewings and repeated messages, we got to it. From North of the Thames <\/a>to south of the river, it was a battle for a viewing, as often you would be offered a slot at 8pm on a weekday, an hour away from you, just to receive a message that it was cancelled as you were about to step out the door.<\/p>\n

Day after day, getting back to the flat to slump on the sofa demotivated and deflated became a monotonous cycle; it was Groundhog Day.<\/p>\n

It only needs to work once, though, so after the many months of my part-time job of finding half-decent accommodation, we found it, a flat, suitable for living, while not extravagant, it is finally somewhere I can call home.<\/p>\n

After almost two months of being a lodger, my London house hunt is over, with a flat secured and Spareroom deleted. I can finally rest knowing that I won’t be sofa surfing for the next six months. Yet this hunt for the past three months has been everything but stress-free, from dodgy HMOs to AI bots spamming you all hours of the night. The London housing market is a minefield.<\/p>\n

So to all those looking in London in the peak summer months, good luck, as it is only with tenacity that you’ll find somewhere that doesn’t look like it belongs in a horror movie.<\/p>\n

With housing crises in numerous London Borough’s, I consider myself lucky to be able to afford and get somewhere that works for me, as there are hundreds of thousands who find themselves in a situation far worse than mine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I feared that I might never find housing when navigating the confusing and frustrating renters’ system A general…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":114338,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[26],"tags":[154,27],"class_list":["post-114337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-london","tag-housing","tag-london"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/117189787792922514","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114337\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/114338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}