" Asking them to find more than £3000 just to become your customer is simply terrible business"
According to the figures, landlords and letting agents in the capital may be costing themselves tenants by requiring them to pay deposits of up to £8650 just to move into a rented home.
Renters in Kensington and Chelsea face eye-watering average deposits of £8650, with Westminster renters needing to find £8081 on average just to be handed the keys to a new property. Bexley renters face the capital’s lowest deposits of just £1655, followed by Havering (£1731).
The study revealed that the top five most expensive London’s boroughs for deposits are Kensington and Chelsea - £8650 , Westminster - £8081, Camden - £5894, Hammersmith - £5490 and Wandsworth - £3569.
The five cheapest boroughs on the other hand are Bexley -£1655, Havering - £1731, Croydon - £1808, Sutton - £1848 and Barking and Dagenham - £1898, with Hackney (£2995) being the capital's most average borough for deposits.
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.
With 862,000 households in London living in the private rented sector at the time of the last census, this could mean £2.6bn sitting in tenancy deposit accounts lost to the capital’s economy.
Ajay Jagota, Managing Director of Dlighted, 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 £3000 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”.
