Last week, I came across a flurry of ads on the house-share site SpareRoom sounding less like they were for cosy, inviting living arrangements than for boarding schools. “Please note – no surprise guests, no music and no use of the living room because it doubles as a bedroom,” wrote one “current flatmate”. Reading it, I wondered if there would be a curfew too.
The tendency of some landlords to police their tenants’ behaviour has been well documented, imposing rules that range from the reluctantly accepted, such as no pets allowed, to the absurd: not using the kitchen at night; ideally being away at weekends; and, in one case, effectively restricting use of the toilet due to a noise ban after 8.30pm extending to the sound of walking.
But ads from flatmates stipulating rules for house-sharing are becoming more common. One person requests that her new flatmate isn’t a big kitchen user. “I’m in and out of the kitchen within 10 minutes,” she clarifies. “Ideally looking for someone similar.” What I personally can cook in just 10 minutes, I’m not sure – but perhaps that’s the point.
Of the new rules being set, limitations on working from home have emerged as the most restrictive. Out of the 30 ads for house-shares I trawl through a day, more than half say that a suitable flatmate is someone who “ideally works full-time out of the house”. Hopefully, you’re kind, friendly and considerate, but ideally, you’re not actually there. Welcome to a rental market where you have the privilege of paying for a room you’re ideally not using for anything but sleep.
On the one hand, the “no WFH” camp argues these rules are just about maintaining the home as a space for rest, recreation and domestic order, rather than office chatter: no one wants to be tiptoeing around someone’s Teams conversations in the living room, or being privy to a six-hour call on synergies. But for the vast majority of people who work from their bedrooms rather than in communal areas in the house, it’s hard to see why working from home has become such a deal breaker.
Much of this dispute of course comes down to money. Rent continues to chip away at income, with tenants in England spending an average of 36% of their earnings on housing, climbing to 42% if you live in London. Renting is expensive enough, and so the argument goes that if you’re spending more time at home then you’re probably using more utilities, and disproportionately adding to bills. Take one scenario from the Guardian’s You Be the Judge series earlier this year. One flatmate, lamenting the “constant boiling of the kettle”, started counting how many cups of tea their flatmate drinks in a day (eight, if you’re curious) when they work from home.
But if we are breaking down everything into bite-size, invoiceable proportions, where do we draw the line? What happens when someone’s partner comes over for a few nights? What happens to the person who loves batch-cooking weeks in advance? I don’t think it’s simply about people being hostile or inconsiderate to their flatmates: it’s that it’s difficult to shake off the nagging sense of being one light-switch flick away from an eye-watering bill when the cost of everything is always soaring.
The explosion of rules on SpareRoom hasn’t emerged from nowhere. It’s a symptom of a wider malaise – a broader sense of dissatisfaction and powerlessness against a backdrop of unaffordable housing, financial uncertainty and life milestones that are perpetually delayed. No one, it seems, has quite become comfortable with the joys of house-sharing either: a recent survey of 2,000 renters aged 20 to 40 by the co-living brand Ark found that 74% had issues with it, with flatmates monopolising the shower or raising energy bills being sources of resentment.
Perhaps, then, it makes sense that people are clinging to the things they can control about their housing conditions – so they’ll vet prospective flatmates to eliminate anyone who works “flexibly” or insists on preheating the oven. You can’t argue with the property market or fix the damp in a flat without being subjected to a degrading six-month-long email chain with an uncaring landlord. But you can set out rules that’ll give you some sense of agency.
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Instead of villainising the flatmate who likes to cook, we should campaign for more affordable housing and join tenant unions to improve our living conditions. So before someone drafts another SpareRoom advert with a list of commandments for their ideal flatmate, maybe it’d be wise to think about whether the flatmate is the problem, or if it’s a system pitting tenants against one another.
