A London renter has been left 'outraged' after his group of seven friends were evicted from their home and the landlord increased the rent by a whopping 143 percent.
In a tale that's become far too common amid the current cost of living crisis, Rich Felgate saw the rent on his former house on Elphinstone Road, Walthamstow, shoot up after he and his housemates were told in September 2022 they had to leave.
Between seven of them, the housemates had been paying £3,000 a month for rent - a figure Rich told Metro was 'quite average' for a house share in the area.
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He said: "We’d lived there for a couple of years and we’d asked to sign a new tenancy just before that and then got given our notice instead so we had to find somewhere else.
"In Walthamstow, properties are becoming very few and far between so we had to move out of the area to Hackney and it took around three months to be able to find somewhere."
The renters believed the landlord wanted them out so they could 'turn the place into two flats'. It wasn't until they'd left that they learned the six bedrooms in the home were now being rented as individual properties for up to £1,600 a month.
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The new format of the house means the landlord could generate £7,600 a month - a 143 percent increase on the £3,000 the seven roommates had been paying.
Likening the house now to a 'sardine kind of place', Rich shared images of the advert for the flats on Twitter, noting how 'each bedroom now has a depressing little microwave and sink next to the bed'.
The bedrooms share a communal kitchen - as you would in a regular house share, though they each have their own bathroom.
The six tenants would also have access to a shared garden. All bills are included in the monthly rent cost, but there is the extra cost of the washing machine and dryer, which are both operated by coins.
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"It’s essentially still geared towards exactly what it was before, but without any kind of communal aspect and over double the price, it was a bit of a shock," Rich said.
The renter said he was 'outraged' by the ads for the property, saying: "People will be looking at the advert and seeing it’s done up relatively nicely, it’s all modern.
"‘But they won’t know that actually, just a few months before someone was paying less than half that amount in somewhere where you don’t need a lock on your door, you’re not sharing a kitchen with strangers, where there doesn’t need to be CCTV and you don’t have to put in a quid every time you want to use a washing machine or something."
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A spokesperson for Your Move, which advertised the rooms, told Metro all the rooms are 'now rented with tenants happy to have secured them'.
"We have had no dealings with previous tenants at this property as we were not the letting agent at that time," they added.
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Emily Brown