Oh look! More good news for renters!
We’re always blabbering on about how expensive London is, but the folks at Mashroom wanted to put it to the test. They looked at fifteen major European cities, and factored in the monthly rental costs for each, putting it into a nice and easy-to-understand metric of rent per square metre. Whilst London somehow avoided the dubious honour of being the most expensive European city for renters (big up Paris!), we did our best to live up to our expensive billing, placing third with a price of £18.13 per square metre of flat.
The study is particularly interesting, if only for the fact that you’re presumably intimately familiar with every single square metre of your flat, having been sequestered there for most of the past ten months. Whilst London’s cost was a full £7 cheaper than Paris, and nearly a fiver less than second-placed Oslo, it’s still enough to but our spenny (yet beloved) city in the upper echelons of Europe. And that’s even after a separate study revealed that renting in the capital actually got cheaper in 2020, would you believe.
The nation as a whole didn’t fare particularly well on the other metrics Mashroom looked at, either. The UK failed to crack the top ten list of best European countries for renting, and also graded out as one of the most pro-landlord nations in Europe (if you’re angling for a pro-tenant nation, Denmark, France, and Spain scored well). Despite Sadiq Khan’s call for a two-year rent freeze in London, it’s not exactly a pretty picture for Londoners, is it?