London’s housing crisis is worsening

There are 106,000 people searching for rooms in the capital, but fewer than 15,000 available.

The number of people looking for somewhere to live in London far outstrips the number of people advertising rooms to rent.

As first reported by Bloomberg, data from SpareRoom, a website that matches prospective tenants with flats and houses, shows that there were more than 106,000 “active renters”, or people looking for rooms in August 2022, compared with just under 15,000 rooms advertised on the site. It is a striking indicator of both London’s and the UK’s worsening housing crisis.