Broken tables and stolen clothes: Londoners on their subletting horror stories

The UK’s rental market has people chasing desperate measures, from serial pet sitting to leaving the country altogether. But in recent years, one means of saving on rental costs has taken off more than any other: subletting.

Social media call-outs for subletters have become prolific to the point of meme-ification. Ads verge on the edge of ridiculous — rent a living room for a couple months from these two cats, stay in my windowless box in Camden for two weeks while I jaunt off to Spain — but nonetheless, sublets have become an entrenched part of the London renting experience, particularly for those putting up with the worst of the London’s housing crisis. 

In a general sense, subletting means renting out a property to that you are already renting from someone else. But in recent years, it’s most often used to refer to specifically letting out rooms: usually when tenants who are renting a place long-term leave for a short period of time and (often unofficially) get someone into their empty room, helping to offset cost of living expenses and ensure they’re not sinking money on an empty pad. If you’re going away for a longer period, it’s a means of holding onto a good place and of avoiding the gruelling search for a new one when you arrive back. For those who have to move to London and face that increasingly soul-destroying process of finding an affordable permanent place, sublets offer a more immediate, cheaper means of temporary accommodation than something like an Airbnb. 

It’s more common than you probably realise – and, with the help of dedicated communities for finding a room online, it’s on the up. In July last year, a study by Direct Line Group found that 25 percent of renters aged 18 to 34 admitted to renting out part of their rented property (ranging from a single room to the entire property) and 17 percent of London tenants said they had sublet. With the average cost of renting in London at £2,070 per month (as of April 2024), it’s little wonder people are willing to sublet, despite the legal and personal risk that it can involve.

The average cost of renting in London is £2,070 per month

Most tenancy agreements will say that you need your landlord’s permission before you bring in a sublet, but if you’re on a fixed-term tenancy, you can sublet without landlord consent, though Citizens Advice warns that you should still let them know. If they say yes, it’s recommended you get it in written form to avoid future disputes. If they say no, they’re not obliged to give you a reason and if you go ahead without their permission, you could be at risk of eviction for breach of contract.  

That’s not the only risk. Most of the time, people entrust their lodgings – usually fully furnished and often still containing their personal belongings – to friends of friends at best, utter strangers at worst. For many, the experience goes smoothly. But when people are desperate to fill a room or secure a place to stay on relatively short notice, things can inevitably go wrong. You might move into a place where expectations and standards of cleanliness are uncomfortably different from your own, or host someone who struggles with basic flatshare etiquette. Time Out spoke to some Londoners who have been on the frontlines of sublets turning (literally and figuratively) sour.  

Foul smells and broken tables 

Liam*, 22, lived with a subletter for three months while one of his flatmates went away for an internship. ‘The guy that came into his room was a nightmare,’ Liam says.  

Said guy was an acquaintance of Liam’s flatmate. First impressions were that he was nice enough and easy to talk to. He was several years older than the rest of the flat, who were all uni students at the time, ‘so we expected someone quite mature,’ Liam recalls. Within days, it became clear that wasn’t the case. 

‘We noticed that he would leave a lot of mess in the living room and there were many times he wouldn’t close the fridge door,’ he says. ‘There were instances where he left the oven on overnight and he just had really poor self-care. The [internship] hours were very long so he’d come home late and was so focused on work that everything else was neglected. It got to the point that if his room door was open, the whole flat would smell.’ 

Twenty-six-year-old Ellie’s* experience isn’t dissimilar. She got a subletter into her old flat in 2020 when the end of her contract and the start of the lease at her new place crossed over and she faced having to pay two rents at once. She found their subletter via Facebook (‘big mistake!’) and when they video-called ahead of the move-in, there were no glaring red flags. ‘He seemed really normal,’ she says. ‘He said he was quiet and planned to keep himself to himself.’

She broke our kitchen table and refused to contribute money for a new one

Once again, the reality turned out to be quite the opposite. ‘We had a slightly dodgy front door but when he moved in I had shown him how to open it  — you had to jiggle the key a bit,’ Ellie says. ‘He came home at 2am, on a school night, and was banging on the door and shouting, waking us all up. I let him in and he just mumbled ‘‘key doesn’t work’’ and barged past me.’ 

Shortly afterwards, the subletter drunkenly attempted to make a Pot Noodle, proceeding to spill its contents all over the floor. The next morning, Ellie found him passed out on the sofa, the hob still switched on. ‘He didn’t clean up his mess and I didn’t see him for two days after that. The next week, he did the whole thing again.’ 

Then, there are the subletters that, even after their lets are up, leave gross reminders of their presence. When Sarah* arrived home from travelling around Central America for three weeks, she found her bedroom carpet overturned, her shoe rack dismantled in a heap on the floor and a used wax strip under her bed. 

It was all the doing of a subletter she’d got in ‘to justify the cost of long-haul flights while also paying the rent for [her] Hackney basement flat’. The letter was a total stranger found via Instagram, who seemed ‘sweet enough and legit’ on first meeting. 

But on top of the state her room was left in, Sarah discovered that her lodger had hosted a dinner party in the kitchen and smoked cigarettes inside. ‘We later found out she broke our kitchen table and refused to contribute money to pay for a new one,’ she says. But with no formal agreement in place, there wasn’t anything she could do. ‘It’s certainly put me off subletting again – at least to complete strangers.’

The month from hell 

For 26-year-old Tasha*, things went to further extremes. A sublet in June turned out to be what she describes as one of the most nightmarish months of her life.

At the beginning, it followed a familiar pattern: the first encounter with the prospective subletter was pleasant enough and ‘on paper she seemed fine’. Her flatmate had to leave the property urgently and they’d already gone through several candidates on SpareRoom, so Claire* (and her pet cat) it was. But Tasha remembers that ‘intuitively [she] didn’t really feel good about it’.  

Her gut instinct proved right: Tasha was subjected to complaints from her new subletter that she was in the flat too much and used the living room excessively, complaining that she didn’t have enough privacy. ‘She just wanted me out of the house and would make me feel guilty for staying in,’ Tasha says.  

At the same time, she began to notice that her toiletries were emptying faster than usual. After finding that her brand new eyeshadow palette had been dipped into and growing increasingly suspicious that such activities weren’t confined to the bathroom, Tasha bought a security camera for her bedroom on the advice of a friend. The next day, she left for the office and got a notification on her phone within 30 minutes. ‘I could see [Claire] live, casually looking through my wardrobe as if it was hers, going through labels one by one,’ Tasha says, still clearly baffled by the whole situation. ‘No shame at all.’ 

Upon seeing the live footage, Tasha manually set off an alarm via the security camera app and watched as Claire swiftly vacated the room. When Tasha arrived home at the end of the day, Claire blamed the alarm on her cat. 

I saw her looking through my wardrobe, going through labels one by one

With just two weeks until the sublet was over, Tasha chose to stay home as much as she possibly could to keep an eye on her stuff. During that time she discovered that her lodger had taken one of her bags, a pair of her shoes and had helped herself to her flatmate’s clothing, which had been stored in boxes left in the room she was letting out. Even after she was confronted, Claire vehemently denied the accusations and when Tasha called police to the property (who said there was nothing they could do), she chucked the stolen garms out of her bedroom window, which were later discovered by neighbours below.  

To round the whole saga off, once Claire had vacated the room when her month-long let was over, she failed to return and clean it. Tasha found dirty underwear on the bed, an entire mugs-worth of coffee spilled down the wall and cat hair plastered across every surface. 

Coming out the other side  

When asked whether his experience put him off subletting, Liam says that leaving your room empty for an extended time while paying London rent simply isn’t an option. When he decided to work abroad over the summer, he found a subletter through Facebook Marketplace and this time, his flatmates had no complaints. 

Oli runs @friend0ffriendz, one of the most successful Instagram sublet accounts, and believes he has cracked the solution to risky flatmate-hunting. He has amassed 47,000 followers since he launched the page in July last year, receiving hundreds of messages and posting at least 20 sublet requests a day. It’s become his full-time job: he takes five percent commission from any successful short-term lets he advertises and keeps longer-term ads free. He tells me the feedback has been ‘overwhelmingly positive’.  

The idea is that you can see people requesting or advertising a sublet and ‘see your mutuals and see people in your friend’s circles, so it’s kind of self-verifying’, which he says is a lot safer and ‘really important’. Oli initially started the account exclusively for his circle of friends after struggling to find rooms himself via SpareRoom. He soon realised that if he opened it up to the wider public users ‘can decide if someone’s close enough in their network to trust them’.

Tasha emphasises that need for trust, appreciating that her experience was an anomaly. ‘One thing I do blame myself for is that I should have trusted my gut and we should have spent more time looking,’ she says. ‘When you’re living with a person you need to be comfortable with them.’ She was much stricter when finding a replacement subletter, asking for people’s proof of workplace, links to social media and references from previous flats.

As long as the cost of living crisis exists, subletting isn’t going away anytime soon – meaning that safe, verifiable means of finding short-term accommodation or people to fill it are all too important. So, if you’re considering letting out your own room, let this be a warning: take your time if you can, trust your instincts and be wary of any cats involved. 

*Names have been changed.