Tenants are fleeing London at record pace to escape rising rents
- Some 40 per cent of London’s rental movers left the city last year
- Rapid rental growth prompted tenants to look outside London
Four in 10 renters moving home in London last year chose to leave the city as pricey monthly payments squeezed budgets to the limit.
More than 90,000 rental households left London in 2022, according to a report from broker Hamptons International. That’s the most in more than a decade and more than double the amount that moved from the city in 2012.
“The rapid recovery of London rents over the last year has left record numbers of tenants looking around for cheaper options,” said Aneisha Beveridge, head of research at Hamptons. “Rents show few signs of deviating from their upward trajectory.”
The average monthly rent paid for a newly let home in Greater London rose 9.1 per cent year-on-year to £2,141 (US$2580) in January, outpacing growth of 8 per cent in the rest of Great Britain excluding the capital during the same period.
Londoners spent more than double the amount on rent than the rest of Britain, which saw the average monthly price rise to £987 last month.
The exodus of tenants marks a reversal of 2021, when more homeowners fled London than renters for the first time in a decade. Renters are at the sharp end of Britain’s cost-of-living crisis, with 8 per cent of private tenants falling behind on housing costs in the three months to November.