LONDONERS' WAY#3 Where students live

I had to search for new accommodation at the same time as I started a new life because I'd booked the students' accommodation for only 1 month. I thought the students' accommodation was so expensive than I expected. That's why I have to find a new place to live. Anyway, I would like to introduce you to the property market in London and how to find flats.

First, the rent in London is so expensive. It is similar to in NY or Hong-Kong. I had thought Tokyo is one of the most expensive cities, but I realized the price in Tokyo is cheaper than in London. London is also a big city and spreading outside. So London has the same problem as other big cities that a city becomes too big and the population is concentrated. Especially, England is a small island country. They don't have too much space, so they have to consider the usage of the land seriously. About residences, a typical one is a terraced house that shares walls with next houses. This type of house has some merits. For example, it can avoid to run out heat, also it can share water pipes and electricity, and so on. But in general, a room is very small.

Because of the former reasons, most singles in London live in shared-flats. There are several ways to share a flat. I describe them in the below chart. Generally, the price increases as going to the right.

And I draw an example of share-flat which is based on the student accommodation I lived before.

Last but not least, I would like to write about how to find a flat. I tried a lot of ways, for example, estate agents, Spareroom, Airbnb, Gumtree, and MixB. Spareroom and Airbnb are an app which is managed by start-up companies. Gumtree is one of the famous websites in the UK, but I think it isn't updating actively now. Needless to say, Airbnb is well known all over the world. On the other hand, Spareroom is the UK’s biggest flatshare website. We can communicate with landlords directly by using both apps. I think Spareroom is optimized for the UK's market, which means that we can find not only a flat but also flatmates. This point is definitely different from Airbnb. 

They are obviously useful but if you don't have much time, you should consider other options because their stocks depend on a season and timing. So I tried to ask estate agents. Their business model is different from the Japanese one. Agents in the UK get fees from only landlords but agents in Japan take fees from both landlords and lodgers! It's just not good. In my case, I might make a contract with the landlord by myself so I gave up that because I couldn't understand formal English for contracts and didn't know British customs about accommodation. Finally, I used MixB which is a bulletin board system for Japanese in the UK... I'm quite comfortable in the current room!

*This journal is based on the project in my school.