A fortnight ago, 25-year-old Catrin, who is looking for somewhere to live from mid-September with two friends, viewed a property in London’s Finsbury Park. She was the first to see the flat, and put in an offer. Soon after, she received an email from the agent saying the landlord would accept if they agreed to a counteroffer £200 PCM higher than the original rate.

‘The level of interest we have had in this property is crazy. Since I saw you, we have had 30 new enquiries which I haven’t had a chance to reply to yet and yesterday we received 20 enquiries including yours,’ he wrote, among other things.

With the new total beyond her budget, Catrin wrote back expressing her disappointment at the landlord’s willingness for prospective tenants to ‘outbid’ each other to reach a price way beyond what he had initially anticipated.

‘I understand Catrin but to be given an opportunity to secure a property in the current market before others get to see it is very rare and I think you should be grateful that he is willing to do this,’ came the reply from the agent.

‘I feel very frustrated,’ Catrin says now. ‘There’s so much demand for housing that they’re able to behave like that, and speak to prospective tenants with such condescension, knowing that they will still be able to let their property out. It’s completely unethical, isn’t it? Making people outbid each other, knowing they’re spending above and beyond what they can actually afford.’

With the price of food, energy, and everyday life soaring, many people can’t afford much—but housing isn’t stopping its upward spiral. At the moment, there’s low supply and high demand to rent in the capital, pushing prices up for the flats that are out there. Zoopla tells the Financial Times that there are about half as many homes available for rent per lettings branch in London as there were between 2017 and 2021.

While the problem is particularly bad in London, due in part to concentration of jobs and opportunities, the rising cost of renting is a nationwide issue. The Zoopla data suggests that there are thirty percent fewer properties up for rent across the rest of the UK, enabling rent hikes across the board. Some of the biggest hikes are occurring in parts of Manchester, Kent, and Liverpool, as well as in seaside towns like Weymouth, Torquay, and Margate. Last week, one Twitter user in South Devon shared that her landlady had raised rent three times so far in 2022 because of her tracker mortgage.

2022 research from the Citizens Advice Bureau, meanwhile, suggests one in six renters are worried about making payments in the next three months. The Big Issue reported in August that evictions for rent arrears had reached their highest level since records began, while research from February suggested that the cost of living crisis was going to force thousands more people into homelessness in England alone.

The tenants facing these price hikes often don’t have a leg to stand on: they’re either trying to find somewhere to live, competing with dozens of interested parties, or clinging on to what they have, swallowing hefty rent increases and putting up with substandard living conditions their landlords just aren’t incentivised to ameliorate.

Pol, for example, is currently in ‘awful disputes’ with their landlord, whose property ‘isn’t safe’, and who has refused or been very slow to do anything about it. When Pol moved in, the gate could be opened from the outside without a key. The landlord eventually put some mesh over the lock for extra security, but it’s been broken multiple times since. Recently, one flatmate’s key got stuck in the lock in the middle of the night, and they were told the costs for replacing it and the lock would have to come out of their deposit.

‘My landlord just shows up whenever she wants,’ says another tenant, Rhiannon. ‘There have been multiple times where I’ve had headphones in, and she’s scared the life out of me as she just appeared out of nowhere. We’ve told her that she has to give us notice but she still turns up.’

These, of course, are stories of what happens when one is able to get into a home in the first place—a process becoming increasingly difficult as bidding wars embed themselves. One man, Ewan, describes losing out on a flat in London for which he had already signed a tenancy agreement, because another group offered to pay £150 per person extra each month, and to provide the total rent for the year up front. ‘Obviously we couldn’t compete with that offer, so our agreement fell through,’ he says.

Anna had been looking for a flat for six months when she viewed one in July this year. Thirty other people had viewed it in the previous two hours, and twelve people made offers, ten of which were above the asking price. But she got on well with the landlady, who said she’d never had more than two people interested in her property at one time, and was offered the tenancy—albeit at a higher price, and with a two-year break clause.

For those who have an even harder time securing a place, the result is prolonged insecurity and all its attendant problems. Earlier this year, Charlie moved from Lincoln to Edinburgh, where he’s working in a school, and he’s been living in precarious accommodation ever since. ‘I’ve been searching for flats and rooms since April,’ he says. ‘After having worked the most gruelling summer of my life, the stress of facing homelessness and wondering where my next bed would be piled on the stress from these hours which resulted in lack of sleep, physical symptoms from ongoing nervous breakdowns and extreme weight loss.’

Magdalena, an international student at the University of Glasgow, felt ‘utterly alone and helpless’ while struggling to find a flat without any family in the country to fall back on. She started looking around August 2021 but, with no luck, was forced to stay at friends’ places and in hostels, before short-term renting a property way beyond her budget until February.

‘It was honestly harrowing. It only hit me a couple months later how much this affected me,’ she says. ‘The constant worry over where we would sleep next week, whether we’ll even be able to stay in Glasgow, made it near impossible to focus on university work or anything else. I didn’t even unpack fully for months after moving in, because I think I was convinced something was going to go wrong again, that we’d have to move again. Nothing felt safe, not really.’

The Scottish government this week introduced a rent freeze and eviction ban to help with the cost of living crisis, a major victory for Scottish housing campaigners Living Rent. But similar action is yet to be forthcoming elsewhere, and the freeze itself is the first of a range of changes that need desperately to happen in housing. This is evident in the fact that the current spate of horrors facing renters are a further expansion of a problem that’s been growing for years, not something new.

‘Perhaps the fraction of renters suffering is higher, but those at the bottom have always felt the things a lot more people are getting a whiff of now,’ Alice Devoy, a Safer Renting caseworker at charity Cambridge House, says. ‘People pay more because they don’t want to be homeless, but that doesn’t mean they have more money.’

There are plenty of suggestions about what can and should be done to help tenants in the short-term, rent controls (that not only freeze costs, but reduce them) and more stringent regulation of landlords among them. While the government proposed some positive-sounding rent reforms earlier this year, the loudest voices for these kinds of measures are tenants’ unions like Living Rent and ACORN, the latter the fastest growing union in the UK.

Sophia Rose, ACORN’s south-east board director, joined after a slum landlord left her without a working fridge in her home in Brighton. ‘I fought my landlord on vital repairs and won, and then realised how powerless I felt. I wanted to join a movement that would take the power back for myself as a low-income person,’ she explains. In her city, ACORN has around 700 members and is currently pushing the council for a landlord licensing scheme. ‘To anyone who feels powerless,’ she continues, ‘I’d say: demand that power back. With others, you are strong.’

Alongside the call for better protections and affordable rents in the private rented sector comes the demand for more council housing, whose stock depletion under Thatcher’s Right to Buy helped drive the present crisis. ‘The government needs to stop prioritising people buying and build houses to increase supply,’ continues Alice. ‘The new extension of the Help to Buy scheme just shows how little this current government is (and always has been) committed to actually building social housing, when it’s really what we need and what we have needed for so long.’

For Alice, that failure ‘comes from and perpetuates’ the idea in Britain that housing is an asset intended to make money, rather than ‘somewhere people live, where they make dinner, where they look after their families and where they essentially are human beings.’ That idea isn’t new to this crisis: it’s one that’s been made pervasive over decades. Forcing the dial back in the opposite direction now seems like one of the key tasks facing the country if it’s to weather the months and years to come.