In neighbourhood group chats across Britain, the HMO (House in Multiple Occupation, or housing with more than three occupants who aren’t from the same family) is the local villain of choice.
For those living inside, a labelled shelf in the fridge and a strict bathroom rota are daily irritants.
For their neighbours, overflowing bins, strangers ringing doorbells in the early hours, crowded parking spaces and a rotating cast of young professionals on rolling contracts are sources of endless discontent.
Yet their number keeps ticking up relentlessly.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine countless British streets where every home has been sliced and diced by landlords into multiple flats.
Licence applications across England rose 40 per cent between 2018 and 2024, from 41,162 to 57,725.
West Lancashire alone saw a 900 per cent increase.
The Times’ conclusion this week is that landlords have been squeezed by higher taxes and tightening regulation, and are switching to HMOs to protect their margins.
This is rational, as the average landlord with a standard family tenancy might expect around £60,000 a year.
The same property, converted into an HMO, can return closer to £120,000.
The maths is not complicated.
The root cause, however, is less simple.
Firstly, HMOs are, in fact, more regulated than standard private rental properties.
They require mandatory licensing, have had minimum room sizes since 2018, and, in theory, are subject to proactive local authority inspections, even if enforcement is patchy.
Secondly, what has changed is not the burden of regulation but the size of the available market.
Wider economic conditions and an inflated housing market mean tenants are now willing – or have been forced – to accept shared accommodation further up the income spectrum, further into their lives, and at far higher cost than before.
Landlords have responded to that demand.
More bedrooms mean more rental income, and more rent attracts a concentration of those drawn by yield rather than by any particular interest in being a good citizen landlord.
This is why the areas with a large rise in HMO applications are also those with localised housing crises.
Edinburgh had the highest number of HMO applications in 2024, at 5,156.
Oxford was second, Bristol third, Southwark fourth.
These are among the most expensive, most constrained rental markets in the country – where graduate retention, population growth and chronic undersupply have combined to push rents to levels that make a single-person tenancy unaffordable for most, while landlords can up costs accordingly.
Dwelling in a cramped flat with 5 strangers has historically been a rite of passage reserved for students and money-conscious recent graduates.
Over the past decade, however, the number of over-65s searching for rooms in flat and house shares rose by 970 per cent.
Meanwhile, only a third of adults currently in shared accommodation could afford to rent a property on their own, and just 12 per....
