If you’ve ever tried to find a place to live in London, you’ll already be all too familiar with the absolute bin-fire that is the capital’s rental market. In fact, perhaps even reading the words “find a place to live” have triggered a fight or flight response, spiking your cortisol levels as you relive some of the most harrowing experiences of your adult life.

I still remember the time, 15 years ago, that I attended a group viewing for a grimy, tiny ex-council flat in Bermondsey, before being told by the cartoonishly evil estate agent that whoever made it back to the agency first to sign the agreement would get the tenancy. Cue me participating in a humiliating Wacky Races-style dash across town against six other women in their twenties. I may have won the flat that day, but I also lost my dignity.

Property ads have long been ripe fodder for ridicule based on their sheer, unadulterated awfulness, be they advertising comically tiny “studios” and box rooms with no window or asking for £700 a month for a sleeping bag on a metal bed in a Hackney warehouse. But in recent years, an even more obnoxious rental trend has crept into housing adverts: live-in landlords dictating that lodgers spend as little time as possible in the property that they’re paying a premium to live in.

This demand can range from asking people to spend some weekends away or stay out late most evenings to refraining from ever working from home or using the communal areas. The latest example to be named and shamed was a room in Hampstead with a single bed, wardrobe, desk and chair. Despite paying the princely sum of £1,350 a month, the future lodger was expected to scarcely ever be there.

“This space would ideally suit someone working longish hours in the city during the week and leaving the city for weekends,” wrote the live-in landlord. “I am also teaching the violin here in the evenings from 4-8.30pm Monday to Thursday, whilst this takes place on a different floor to the bedroom I am offering, it would be audible, so this room would suit someone who is not home until post-8.30pm.” The ad also made it clear that whoever took the room would be prohibited from using the living room, having any guests, and making noise after 11pm.

The listing quickly went viral, notching up more than 85,000 likes after a woman called Sophia posted screenshots on X (Twitter) alongside the caption: “Anyone looking for a single bedroom with no heating where you can’t make noise and can only be home from 8.30pm to 8am (weekdays only)? Here’s one for a bargain (£1,350)!!!”

“No guests? You can’t even have a friend round to sit in the bedroom with you like a teenager!” responded one horrified social media user. “So basically this person wants a ghost to pay for haunting her flat,” commented another. Unsurprisingly, given the backlash, the advert has since been deleted.

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Yet it’s far from the only example. Another housing advert was mercilessly mocked in October last year, after a couple uploaded a listing on Facebook for their spare room in Battersea – but demanded that whoever rented the room “give them nights to themselves”.

“The room would normally rent for £1,300 although we are offering reduced rent of £1,200 plus bills, as we are hoping to find someone who has a partner or family nearby that they can spend the night with occasionally, and offer us the apartment for three or four separate nights a month to relax on our own,” it read.

This, too, was swiftly deleted after a social media pile-on ensued; one X user shared a screenshot with the sarcastic caption: “‘Please rent our spare room but don’t actually live here. For the privilege of £1,200 plus bills’.”

And in March 2024, another couple went unintentionally viral after they advertised for someone to pay a subsidised rent of £400 a month. Sounds like a good deal, right? However, the small print stipulated that whoever moved in was expected to look after the homeowners’ children, unpaid, for three hours a day, plus only live at the property Monday to Friday.

All of these stories smack of people wanting to have their cake and eat it. Yes, they want another person to pay their mortgage; no, they don’t want the inconvenience of sharing their home.

“It’s wrong that landlords think they have a right to collect ever-higher rents without dealing with the ‘hassle’ of having an actual human being in their house,” says Jae Vail, spokesperson for the London Renters Union. “Since the pandemic, we’ve seen a surge in rental adverts imposing bizarre, restrictive conditions: landlords demanding tenants vacate during certain hours, banning working from home, or offering homes so tiny they barely fit a bed.”

Nye Jones, head of campaigns at renters’ rights organisation Generation Rent, agrees that there appears to have been an uptick in live-in landlords imposing greater restrictions on tenants. “There is a huge imbalance within our current housing system between those who own property and those who are forced to rent it,” he says. “There’s such huge demand for rental properties, particularly in major cities like London, and such a paucity of affordable options, that it leads to some people – thankfully a small minority of people – abusing this and demanding eye-watering sums for rooms with these ridiculous conditions attached.”

He cites the cutthroat private rental market in the capital, which sees flats shown to 50 or so people, culminating in bidding wars and properties going for hundreds of pounds over the asking price as a principal factor. Under such circumstances, he says, it’s understandable that some renters would “get to a stage where you become so desperate that you start to think about taking these offers and accepting these deals – not using the living room, for example, or not being there a certain number of nights a week – just to have somewhere to live. But I think, really, we should never get to a stage where this is considered normal. Homes are the foundation of our lives, and no one should be expected to have a curfew – no adult for sure.”

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It’s important to clarify that the explosion in unreasonable demands from landlords largely affects lodgers rather than tenants. The rights of the latter are generally protected by Assured Shorthold Tenancy (AST), which tends to follow a standard format, whereas lodgers have very little in the way of similar protection.

Homeowners can take in a lodger tax-free on rent of up to £7,000 a year – from there, the living agreement is drawn up between the two parties. The lodger can be evicted at any time with less than a month’s notice, depending on the terms originally agreed and, unlike a tenant or a subtenant, a lodger does not have exclusive rights to the room they pay for. They cannot lock their bedroom before going out, as it has to remain accessible to the landlord in the lodger’s absence without prior notice or permission. Often there isn’t even any official paperwork to back up the arrangement, which makes the issue of “rights” even murkier.

“It is a lodger’s arrangement and therefore the rules are as negotiated between the parties,” Sean Hooker, head of redress at The Property Redress Scheme, told LandlordZonethe UK’s largest online landlord property website. “If the landlord sets out the conditions and the lodger agrees to those conditions, there is nothing illegal about that. You have no additional rights as a lodger – all you are doing is renting a room out on whatever basis the parties agreed.”

For tenants, protections are improving through new legislation in the UK. The Renters Rights bill, a “manifesto commitment to transform the experience of private renting” that was introduced by Labour in September last year and recently had its third reading in the House of Commons, is expected to come into force before the end of 2025. It will ban Section 21 “no-fault” evictions, increase notice periods for tenants to four months, and prevent bidding wars. These improvements are a massive positive first step, say the experts – but none of them really apply to lodgers.

“For lodgers living with landlords, the picture remains pretty bleak,” says Vail. “Lodgers live at the mercy of their landlords and face a lack of protections around eviction or deposits, with no relief in sight from the upcoming Renters’ Rights Bill, which does not cover these kinds of living arrangements.”

The bill also does nothing to tackle rent affordability; private rents increased by 9.1 per cent across the UK in the 12 months to November 2024. With this hike in prices, you’d at least expect to be able to come and go as you please – but apparently not.

So, how can we make renting fairer in the UK? “The next thing the government can do, without question, is to bring in measures to tackle affordability, or the cost of renting crisis, as we would call it, in particular by looking at rent caps,” says Jones. That would mean restricting the amount by which landlords can raise rents by tying it to wage growth or inflation (whichever is lower).

In the long-term, meanwhile, Jones argues that it’s about creating “far more genuinely affordable housing”. Many people are forced into the rental market because they have no other option – for many first-time buyers, purchasing a home at current prices in London is completely unattainable.

While demand outstrips supply, we’re not likely to see an end to outrageously restrictive “rooms for rent” ads any time soon. But we should. Expecting unlimited access to the property you pay an exorbitant amount to call home shouldn’t be an unreasonable expectation. As for live-in landlords who would like their mortgage to be paid without the inconvenience of another human being physically present – might I suggest selecting a poltergeist with deep pockets to be your next lodger?