I didn’t know that my landlord was my friend until he told me so. The timing, admittedly, was suspicious. I had just informed him that I wanted to move out, and he had just informed me that I had chosen a particularly awkward month of the year to decide this, actually. In a tense phone call, he appealed to my kind heart. “Róisín”, he said. “We’re good friends, me and you.”
A case for the defence (his): I suppose we had known each other for three years, which is longer than some of my cherished loved ones. And he did know a lot about me, to be fair. He knew my previous addresses, he knew my credit score, he knew what I did for work and how much I earned doing it. Comparatively, I knew next to nothing about him, however. Anything I did know I found out through online sleuthing — Googling his name and the address I’d gleaned from the estate agent middleman of our friendship, scrolling through mentions of him on Twitter and using maps to virtually stand on his street and look at his house.
But in the landlord-tenant relationship, how much or little should either know about each other? Do you have to be friends to have an equal relationship? Can you be friends? Should you?
Recent research from estate agency Hamptons found that 149,000 more young people in the UK are now renting flats or rooms than a year ago, bringing the total rent paid in the UK last year to £85.4bn — up 71 per cent in a decade. Under-45s — my generational cohort, tied to the rental market by higher interest rates, house prices and ludicrous deposits — pay two-thirds of that; a cumulative bill of £56.2bn. Faced with that demand, landlords have their pick — and are able to siphon through the choice by making checks to see if tenants are financially sound, if they are reliable.
Landlords need protecting too — rent arrears climbed in 2024 — and part of any framework for protecting tenants should involve ensuring a supply of fair landlords with good properties. But as it currently stands, a dichotomy has emerged where tenants effectively market themselves to landlords in order to be selected, as if at an audition. Like first dates and job interviews, they present the best parts of themselves, and hope it’s enough to get lucky. But on the flipside, they don’t traditionally know much — sometimes anything — about their landlords.
While Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have landlord registers that hold useful background information, England — aside from London’s “Rogue Landlord Checker” — has no system for checking information about landlords, such as knowing how many properties they own. It is not possible to check references, find out their job, or if they have been fined or prosecuted by a local council. There’s no effective way to find out if they will make life difficult for tenants. It’s a one-way exchange of personal information that makes for a strange basis for a relationship. The renters’ rights bill would be the first step towards a solution to this problem — and last month the landmark bill returned to parliament with an amendment that moved it one step closer to becoming a reality.
Inside this current vacuum of information, it’s perhaps natural to either want to befriend your landlord to get to know who they are — or begin to speculate and have a snoop on social media. This obsession over anonymity became part of the basis for my novel, I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There. It’s a ghost story set during the rental crisis. In the book, protagonist Áine finds herself driven to the brink of madness by the fact something about her flat is just a bit . . . off. She and her boyfriend deal with a parade of letting agents who don’t care about her concerns. Her landlord is similarly spectral. The characters are not great believers that you should be friendly with your landlord.
But plenty of people who rent think otherwise. Lots are chummy with the people who own their properties. Recently I went to a dinner party at the flat of a couple who had just moved in together, and who spoke fondly about their landlord dropping by for a visit and introducing them to her new baby. They seemed happy, and she seemed nice, but was this person their friend, or was this a Foucauldian imposition to check if they were suitable and how well they would look after her investment?
A parasocial friendship between landlord and tenant could arguably make solving problems direct and quicker — in minutes of a WhatsApp conversation, rather than weeks of emails between an overstretched agent (in London alone, property managers can deal with 50 to 200 addresses at one time). But friendliness can be taken advantage of. If someone seems nice, you’re more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt to get away with more — both ways.
Experts on both sides of the landlord-tenant divide are cautious about the potential blurring of personal and professional boundaries that comes with friendship. “You’re not friends, you’re in a business relationship,” the estate agency Leysbrook advises its landlords. “By adding them on social media, you’re crossing a line between personal and professional, so it’s important to stay mindful of this.”
The Tenants’ Voice, an online community hub for renters, goes further. “Don’t forget that you’re not a guest,” it writes on the subject of landlord friendship. “This is a business relationship. There might appear to be blurred lines when you’re living in someone else’s home but really this is a straightforward transaction: rent for exclusive possession. And that’s it. The minute you start trying to please your landlord — or seeing them as anything other than a service provider — you enter into a personal relationship of like and dislike that could impact on your living situation. Just don’t do it: keep it professional, courteous but distant.”
On a subreddit message board for landlords, whether to be friends with your tenant is a regular discussion topic. “Most of what’s written here about landlord/tenant relationships is contentious but I know it’s not the norm,” writes one. “My screening process for tenants is routine but thorough. It seems like my tenants are excellent. Great to talk to, pay rent on time, take excellent care of the property and are busy professionals. Do y’all keep a pulse on how friendly to get with great folk who are just renting with you? Do you do other non-property-related business or social events?” The response was mixed. While some landlords liked to know who was living in their properties, plenty of others saw it as a mixture of business and pleasure.
“At the end of the day, there is a line,” writes one. Another offers: “We have wonderful tenants who we can joke with or chat with, we do not go further than that. We do not hang out or socialise together. They are very nice and only reach out when something is broken. Anything not related to the property is too much in my opinion.”
But is what’s needed simply less friendship (faux or not) and a more equitable system between landlords and tenants? The tide could be slowly beginning to turn on that unequal relationship, thanks to a confluence of factors. First, demand for rental properties is finally beginning to drop, thanks to marginal improvements in supply. Recent research from Rightmove reveals that the average advertised rent of properties coming to market outside of London has fallen this quarter for the first time since pre-pandemic 2019. Yes it’s small: dropping by 0.2 per cent to £1,341 per calendar month. In real terms that’s a drop of £3, and rents are still 4.7 per cent higher than last year, albeit with a slower rate of growth. Agents are calling it a “cooling” of a feverishly hot market.
“We’ve seen a levelling off in demand from tenants, due to many factors including the end of the post-pandemic surge for new rental requirements,” says John Baybut, managing director at Berkeley Shaw Real Estate in Liverpool. “However, demand is generally still pretty strong and the market is still busier than before the pandemic. Tenants are paying very high rents, so with more supply on the market now, some are being more choosy.” He warned that “landlords have to be careful to price accurately right now, despite having their own affordability pressures with high mortgage rates”.
The renters’ rights bill promises to protect tenants more than a friendship might. As well as the introduction of the private rented sector database of landlords and their properties, if passed the bill would introduce new rules to cap advance rent payments at one month and safeguard recently bereaved families, as well as abolishing Section 21 “no fault” evictions, ending rental bidding wars and tackling unreasonable rent increases. Let’s hope this will eliminate the need to pretend to be pals, and for tenants to market themselves in the hope of being picked to win a bidding war on a rental property.
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It’s “bad news for landlords”, says Gary Hall, head of lettings at Knight Frank estate agents. “Under the amendments, any payment of rent made before a tenancy agreement is signed will be a prohibited payment. The current framework puts landlords and agents at constant risk of enforcement action for something that is out of their control.”
Perhaps it’s time, though, in the interests of both tenant and landlords, to see renting as a fair transaction that doesn’t require any kind of parasocial relationship or friendship. Relationships that can end in tears, or broken promises, or dead WhatsApp chats with people you’ll never speak to again in your life.
At least, that was the case for me. It’s a sad end to the story, I’m afraid. After our emotional chat in which my landlord appealed to the strength of our friendship, and in which I elected to test the strength of that friendship by seeing whether it would survive without me paying him thousands of pounds a month, our relationship has faltered. In the weeks after I moved out, our texts became terse and repetitive; I asked him to please return my deposit, he delayed returning my deposit. Eventually it came, the death knell of a relationship — I moved our correspondence to email, where I threatened to report him to the DPS (Deposit Protection Service) with a bunch of ominous CCs. The deposit has since been returned but we haven’t spoken. I doubt we will again. It’s very sad, really. I thought we were friends.
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