Earlier this year, 26-year-old Sophie spent two months dredging through spare room adverts on Facebook and SpareRoom as she tried to find somewhere to live in Oxford. She estimates that in that time she responded to 50 adverts, but only around one in ten of her messages received a reply. “Pretty bad odds,” she says.

The stress didn’t end when she did manage to wrangle the occasional viewing. “One household asked me about my cooking habits, as I put it down as one of my hobbies on my SpareRoom profile,” she recalls. “They were like: ‘we don’t really want someone who’s in the kitchen a lot, because we like to cook and host people’.”

Sophie was taken aback. “I get that no one wants a housemate who takes over the kitchen and makes a mess everywhere, but also, I’d have been paying equal rent. So it felt a bit wild to me that they felt they could stipulate that it was OK for them to use the kitchen [a lot], but not for me.”

On separate viewings, Sophie was quizzed about her relationship status. “I understand that it can be a bit of a ‘red flag’ for people, if they think your partner is going to be around two or three nights a week and rack up the bills,” she says, but adds that she felt like she had to stop mentioning her boyfriend when meeting potential housemates. “I couldn’t be fully transparent about myself. It felt like an interview.”

As anyone who has searched for a spare room recently will tell you, Sophie’s experience is far from unusual. It’s become commonplace for adverts for rooms on SpareRoom and Facebook renters’ groups to list very specific criteria for their ideal housemate. In the past few months alone, I’ve seen current tenants stipulate that they won’t live with smokers or vapers (even if they smoke or vape outside), students, freelancers, or remote workers.

In ordinary circumstances, expressing preferences for your ideal housemate is fair enough: but in the current climate, ‘preferences’ have become ‘requirements’, leading to frustration and stress for renters searching for a room – especially when these ‘requirements’ are ludicrously specific. “I was asked at a viewing what my star sign was. I said Sagittarius, then they laughed and said ‘thank God, we were looking for another fire sign’,” one renter tells me. “My friend was asked about her music choice and was asked to show them her Spotify,” says another. A third claims she was asked “‘Who do you like better: Rihanna or Beyoncé?’. If you said Beyoncé you were cut.”

“It made me feel like I’d have been a second-rate tenant in my own home, but I feel like that’s a common theme with the current housing crisis” – Madeleine 

The reason behind this can be largely ascribed to the fact demand for rented accommodation is far outstripping supply: latest figures from Rightmove show that the average number of renters requesting to view one property has skyrocketed from six in 2019 to 25 today. Separate data from Zoopla shows that at present the demand for rented accommodation is more than 50 per cent above average, while the total supply has fallen by over a third.

There simply isn’t enough housing to go around, and this is how we’ve ended up in our present, nightmarish situation, where individuals are doing whatever it takes to stand out as an ‘ideal’ tenant – often just to live in a mould-flecked box room with a sad-looking rail in lieu of an actual wardrobe. “People looking for a home are being put in increasingly precarious situations, and are being forced to do more and more to secure a roof over their heads,” says Jack Yates, communications officer at housing union ACORN. “Whether that’s bidding over the advertised price, by putting down huge deposits, providing hugely intrusive and unnecessary background information, or by being expected to go above and beyond to prove that they would be a ‘better tenant’ than another.” With this in mind, it’s no wonder that private renters are twice as likely as homeowners to suffer from anxiety.

Like Sophie, 26-year-old Madeleine was also grilled about her relationship status by the two existing housemates when she recently viewed a room in a three-bedroom flat. “I was in a long-term relationship, so I let them know and asked if it would be OK for my partner to stay over for one weekend per month,” she says. “They looked at each other and said ‘that might be OK’ – which very clearly meant that it was not OK.”

Conscious that she’d said the ‘wrong’ thing, Madeleine tried to stress that her relationship status wouldn’t have any bearing on her behaviour. “They’d also said that they were a very sociable house, so I made a point of saying that we’re a very sociable couple and wouldn’t just be holed up in my room. But they still didn’t seem very happy.”

“It was super awkward and I immediately knew there was no way I could stay there as I’d constantly feel uncomfortable having my partner in the house, which was a shame as it was cheap rent in a good location,” Madeleine continues. “It made me feel like I’d have been a second-rate tenant in my own home, but I feel like that’s a common theme with the current housing crisis.”

There’s a clear power imbalance in these situations, and in some instances, this power is abused. On one end of the spectrum, there are situations like Madeleine’s or Sophie’s, where prospective tenants are turned down for arbitrary reasons – but on the other, more insidious end, fully-fledged discrimination is allowed to fly under the radar. It’s almost impossible to prove that a SpareRoom or Facebook message went unanswered because of an applicant’s race, age, disability, gender, or sexual orientation – especially when many adverts alone receive hundreds of responses. 

“When there is less to go around, the more discrimination there will be,” Yates explains. “It can sometimes be hard to prove, but we’ve definitely heard from people who think another tenant was chosen over them because of their race, or because of their disability, or because the landlord preferred somebody of a different age.”

It’s difficult to know what current tenants seeking new housemates can do to make the process fairer; sifting through hundreds of messages and having to let people down isn’t easy. 27-year-old Sarah* advertised a spare room on both SpareRoom and Facebook back in March, and describes the process as “overwhelming”. “In less than 24 hours since listing the room, I had over 250 messages on SpareRoom, and another 200 over the next couple of days,” she recalls, adding that she received even more messages on Facebook. “I ended up turning my notifications off.”

“We are not each other’s enemies [...] we’re all just trying to find a place to live and not pay a million pounds for it” – Sophie

Sarah explains that it felt “impossible” to narrow down applications, largely because everyone presented themselves as very similar. “They all described themselves as ‘friendly, outgoing but enjoys their own space’ and enjoying similar things like running, cooking, and going to the pub,” she explains. It’s a common theme in renters’ groups: now that competition for rooms is so fierce, people are keen to appear as amenable and ‘neutral’ as possible, akin to dating app users littering their profiles with inoffensive beige flags.

Sophie – who eventually found a spare room in Oxford in June – says she doesn’t hold it against current tenants for being picky when choosing a new housemate. “Our generation are staying in shared accommodation for so much longer than in the past, so people are more selective about what they will and won’t tolerate or what they will prefer in a housemate,” she says. It’s true: the average age of a first time home buyer in the UK was 26 in 1980, whereas today it’s 37.

Our frustrations should really be directed towards the government, rather than fellow tenants. “We are not each other’s enemies,” Sophie continues. “It’s very important to remember that we’re all just trying to find a place to live and not pay a million pounds for it. This is not our fault: it’s landlords’ fault, it’s the government’s fault, it’s capitalism.”

“The lack of decent and affordable homes is a cause for concern, and it’s leading to more and more of the situations that you have described,” Yates explains. He points to policies which could help address the situation: banning no-fault evictions, rent controls, an ambitious council homes building programme, giving local authorities the power and resources they need to clamp down on rogue landlords. He adds that this week, ACORN and other leading renters’ organisations have released the Renters’ Manifesto, “a call to the political parties to commit to the bold changes needed to fix the housing crisis ahead of the next election, and sets out the steps needed to do this.”

Evidently, the situation is fixable. Whether politicians actually want to fix it remains to be seen.

*Name has been changed

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