I detest landlords ... but now I am becoming one

I despise landlords. Find me anyone who has rented in a city like London for over a decade who feels anything other than deep animosity towards them. I even ended up loathing my last landlady, who was responsive, fair and let me leave my lease a month early.

On the penultimate day of my residence in her studio flat in Kensington Olympia, we made awkward small talk as a man from British Gas checked the boiler.

I had just bought a flat (only possible with a humongous wodge of cash from the Bank of Mum and Dad) and I told her I was worried I had overstretched myself amid all the dire economic news. “It levels out in the end,” she said.

“I was worried I couldn’t afford this flat when I bought it – and I paid £44,000 for it.”

I wanted to crawl up to the mezzanine I slept upon ( yes, dear reader, I paid £1,515 a month to rent a flat with a bedroom I couldn’t stand up in), and scream into my pillow. In the 11 months I had lived in her flat, I had paid £16,665 in rent – more than a third of what she had bought the place for, back when a property in London did not cost over 14 times the average household income.

My hatred for landlords has never been personal. Sure, some of them were shoddy, overcharged me on utilities and left me without heating for weeks in the winter, but I didn’t hate them for that. I hated them for their good fortune to be born during the post-war baby boom and my misfortune to be born a millennial – and for the other subsequent haul they therefore extracted from me on a monthly basis.

But now I’m on the other side of the gulf. I bought a crumbly two-bedroom place in south London instead of a polished one- bedroom flat because I wanted to go freelance and, aware that my salary might be unstable and precarious, I opted for the security of an extra bedroom to rent out if need be.

Lo and behold, it’s time to rent out that room and become a live- in landlord.

I’ve seen friends embrace a similar change of circumstances so completely that I wonder whether they recall that they were once a tenant – or that they are only not one any more thanks to the largesse of a parent. One friend announced in the pub that she was raising the rent on her flat by sashaying her hips, making a clicking sound and gesturing with her hand that it was going “up, up, up”.

I never want to be like this. Even renting out the room feels like going over to the dark side. And yet I know from my own time attending viewings with dozens of other prospective tenants and being encouraged to bid hundreds of pounds extra to secure a property that we need more landlords. The reason the rental market is such a mess is because there are simply not enough homes to meet the clamouring demand.

Rising mortgage rates, the withdrawal of tax relief and the comparative ease and tax efficiency of Airbnbing a home instead of renting it out to a long-term tenant has led to an exodus of landlords, leaving too many renters fighting over a dwindling supply of flats and sending rents soaring. Like it or not, landlords are an essential part of the ecosystem of the capital.

The first thing to do was put a fair price on the room, unlike the people advertising poky bedrooms in houses without living rooms for £ 1,250 a month. I settled on a sum that covered half my mortgage and my service charge and that I considered fair. I’ve had some interest and I’ll carry out viewings next week.

Wish me luck as I attempt to be that rare thing, a landlord I would not hate. It may well be an impossible feat but I’m going to try.

‘I had paid £16,665 in rent – more than a third of what she had bought the place for’