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TODAY'S OTHER NEWS

Average London renter now requires £3K deposit, says campaigning letting agent

Tenants in London are now required to pay up to £8,650 just to move into a rented home, it has been claimed.  

Research from deposit-free renting firm Dlighted has revealed that the average tenancy deposit paid by tenants in London now stands at £3,014 - even when capped at the equivalent of six-weeks rent by the government’s draft Tenant’s Fees Bill.

Renters in Kensington and Chelsea face the highest average deposits of £8,650, with Westminster renters needing to find £8,081 on average.

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Bexley renters face the lowest deposits in London of just £1,655, followed by Havering where the average deposit stands at £1,731.

According to Dlighted’s figures, these are the top five most expensive London’s boroughs for deposits:

Kensington and Chelsea - £8650

Westminster - £8081

Camden - £5894

Hammersmith - £5490

Wandsworth - £3569

 

The five cheapest boroughs on the other hand are:

Bexley  -£1655

Havering - £1731

Croydon - £1808

Sutton - £1848

Barking and Dagenham - £1898.

The recently published English Housing Survey revealed that 30% of homes in the capital are now privately rented, with private rented homes overtaking owner-occupation as London’s most popular form of housing tenure.

Given that around 862,000 households lived in London’s private rented sector at the time of the last census, this could mean £2.6bn sitting in tenancy deposit accounts, which Dlighted’s managing director, Ajay Jagota, insists is “lost to the capital’s economy”.

He said: “Recent research showed that a quarter of UK families have no savings, and another quarter have less than £100 in the bank. Asking them to find more than £3,000 just to become your customer is simply terrible business.

“It’s obvious: Restricting potential renters to people who have thousands of pounds in the bank, or risking renters getting into a huge amounts of debt just to rent with you costs you customers. Deposit free renting makes it easier to find and keep good tenants, whilst offering you 200 times more protection against damage and rent arrears.

“It’s also bad for the wider economy to have £2.6bn of Londoner’s money gathering dust or gathering interest for someone else when it could be used to help them get a foot on the property ladder, or to save for the future”.

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  • Kristjan Byfield

    Average rent in London is around £450 pw amounting to a deposit of £2700 but average tenancy has 3 people so £900 per person. Not cheap but not as dramatic as this article likes to make out. As for K&C residents shelling out over £8k- I don't think people paying £1200+ per week in rent are too worried about affordability factors. Would be nice to see DLighted take a slightly less scaremongering approach to its pieces once in a while.

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