Rental Opportunity of the Week: A Great Investment For Scumbag Landlords

What is it? For once, something actually interesting: a side-by-side comparison of two studio apartments, both in the same building both for sale, one furnished and one not.

Where is it? You’re thinking – no I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that’s not very interesting. But it is, so you’re wrong: Both apartments are essentially functionally identical – same size, same layout, &c. – but one is the raw, clean-up, unfurnished ideal the estate agents want to show you (an empty apartment always looks cleaner! An empty apartment allows you to imagine yourself, and your things, entirely! You can project yourself onto the blank canvas of an empty apartment!), and the other is the reality: the same flat but with someone living in it, with all their living person’s things. We very rarely see these small flats in a state of being lived-in: We just imagine living there would be bad. Today we get to see whether it is bad or not. And yes, obviously it is bad.

What is there to do locally? The flat(s) are on Caledonian Road, so sort of near Kings Cross and Islington but also not, and from the listing for both flats the local area is described as such: “Caledonian Road is an envy-inspiring location minutes away from Upper Street with its trendy bars restaurants and boutiques. The property is only a 3 minutes walk to Caledonian Road and Barnsbury Train Station or 10 Minute Walk to Caledonian Road tube and served well for buses to Kings Cross, Old Street, and West End.”

I always think these descriptions give a singular peek into the alien head of an estate agent: who exactly is choosing to live in a single windowed studio apartment in Caledonian Road, but is also motivated by geo-proximity to trendy bars, restaurants, and boutiques?

‘Yeah hey it’s me, a person entirely imagined by an estate agent. So I am single with a professional career that somehow earns me many tens of thousands of pounds a year. I am out every night of the week: £16 rum cocktails served to me in tacky loud tiki bars, £120-per-head meals at restaurants that nobody ever reviews, a cheeky bus or tube to the West End to take in a show. On the weekend I go to darkly painted House of Hackney-print boutiques run by bohemian Islington wives and buy a leather handbag that costs just shy of two grand.

‘And then I come home to a fucking shitty studio where I have a two hob and a fire blanket and one big window in the ceiling, because despite liking the finer things in life, “where I sleep literally every night of the week” is not one of them. Dubai soon! I genuinely think Stratford is a nice area of London!’ 

A sidenote, but It is also very telling that the most extravagant and interesting and also only hobby that estate agents can ever think of a person having is “liking shopping”, isn’t it?

Alright, how much are they asking? On sale for £145,000, cash buyers only, both flats presented as an investment opportunity with an annual yield starting at 6.24 percent. So basically they have calculated it and they reckon you can buy this then rent it out for £754 a month. It’ll take 16 years for you to get all your money back, (and that’s if you don’t raise the rent, ever) and then you’re in profit, and then once you get bored of being in profit you can sell the flat, which will also be for a profit, because by then somehow the housing market will make this worth £350,000. You see how the racket works now, don’t you? You see the scurrying little legs on the underside of the beetle –

Realistically we’ve been doing this dance together for a number of years now and so I will allow you one question. You can ask one question of me. I think that’s fair. Do you have it? Do you have the question in mind, right now? OK, you can ask it: Why do you always make me read 600 words of some bullshit before you even show me the flat. Why does the format demand that. It is a completely incoherent way of writing an article. Are you insane. Why do you do that? Why? A good question, and a fair one too. I will not be answering it today.

Here’s your pictures: first, the blank flat, where you can go, “Hmm! Not so bad, I suppose. Small, obviously. Tiny. Absolutely tiny. But it’s clean and— I’ve just noticed there isn’t a bed. They’ve tricked me. I forgot I need a bed, to sleep in. They’ve dodged around that by just not showing what it looks like with a bed in it. Well done, estate agents. You’ve out-thought me once again”, and then the furnished flat, where you will go: oh, fucking hell. God— I mean. Fuck me. God, OK. That’s how— fucking hell, OK. That’s what living in one of these places actually looks like, then. We’re now above 800, words, if you’re wondering:

I am not here to make personal judgements about the person who is currently living in the second flat, and neither are you. That’s not what we’re here for. If I had to put even one-tenth of my possessions in a space this size, it would be an absolute fucking shit-tip. I know we all watched that Marie Kondo series, and maybe sorted out like two drawers as a result of it, so we all think we now subscribe to tidy living, but fundamentally I do not think it is possible to live in a space this size and keep everything neat.

There is not enough space for every thing you need to exist and live, even if you are precise about how many things you choose to have, and even if they all have a particular way of being folded away and tidied. “You can hang your pans from the wall!” is only useful advice up to a certain point, and this is beyond it. The square-footage of this room is a nudge beneath 18 metres. You are essentially looking inside the back of a Transit van that doesn’t move. 

Critics of course will notice that, in the unfurnished flat, the bathroom door opens out, which further diminishes available space on the floor for where a bed can go (the front door opens inwards, which also gets in the way: There is no way you’re getting a double bed in this room, at all, so forget that). Each flat has a single skylight – nothing says “this is worth £754 a month in rent” like a single window, in the ceiling – and, if I’m not mistaken, the unfurnished flat seems to open directly into… another identical flat, with shelves and a skylight, only delineated by a shared interior window you have to pull a curtain over so people can’t see in.

Impossible for me to tell for sure without further photographic evidence, but there’s a real chance there’s just another flat there, and anyone renting in this one has to walk through it to get to theirs (I will concede there’s a chance it’s just a shared hallway. That is the “good” scenario here: that a shared hallway is just a curtain and a single-pane window away from your bed, your kitchen, and your bathroom, which are all more-or-less the same room. This is the good version of what is behind that window).

The furnished flat has a very precise pathway cleared along the floor, which cannot possibly get mess on it or the whole property will become unnavigable; it has the bed turned sideways to the room in what I’m guessing it the only viable configuration it can be in, crammed flush against a wardrobe and two feet away from a kitchen. It has a children’s painting fixed to one wardrobe and I really hope that doesn’t mean a child is having to live here.

What I find most ominous, though, are the three (three!) cans of Tesco air freshener and three sprayers of Febreze, suggesting there is a scent or odour that filters greasily through this entire building, and cannot be overcome, only covered. I can imagine this purely because: Anyone who lets these two flats out to human beings does not care about them, and so on that level they would never do anything to fix a putrid odour or smell. I am not saying this flat does smell. I am saying that if it began to, nothing would ever be done about it. 

The sad fact is that despite all this, these two flats both count as a viable investment opportunity in a country where property prices and business rates are essentially a protected class. If I went into Dragons’ Den with this – “Hello Dragons, my name’s Joel, I’m asking for £150,000 for 90 percent of my company” – those cunts (not Meaden – Meaden is not a cunt! – but the rest are, yes, horrible cunts) would bite my absolute hand off for this.

“So how much are you making each year?”, that little podcast Tory would ask me, and I’d go: Probably about £10,000. If I want to pressure them, I could raise it to 11, 11 and a bit. “I’m just wondering, I’m just wondering: How do you find people to live in one of these?” the Scottish one goes. And I just say: on Gumtree, probably. They’re desperate. Peter Jones flashes his teeth, looks at his notebook, and pauses. “I’m going to make you an offer.”

They all get in a bidding war. Touker Suleyman is making a series of uncomfortable, inhuman, squirting little noises. They are grabbing at each other to buy this. That’s the country we live in, sadly. Make £145,000 and put it into a shithole in Caledonian Road and you’ll be financially comfortable for the rest of your squalid little life. If you care about an afterlife and the cleanliness of your soul going into heaven, though, I would advise against it. 

@joelgolby