The average age of tenants living in shared houses in the UK is now 35
Thought leadership by Adam Pigott CEO of tlyfe (Openbrix)
“The headline figure that tenants are now in their mid 30’s and still have to share facilities, not even have the privacy of renting the whole residence shows that there is a fundamental shift in the pattern of occupancy.
For years, the image of a shared house has been closely associated with students, recent graduates and people in their early twenties taking their first steps into independent living. Sharing a kitchen, negotiating the bathroom schedule and putting up with a succession of unfamiliar housemates was often seen as a temporary stage of life before moving into a flat or house of your own.
That picture is changing.
Today, a significant proportion of people living in shared accommodation are well into their careers. They may have full-time jobs, established professional lives and considerably more experience of renting. They may also have very different expectations of the experience.
The shared house has become less of a rite of passage and more of a practical housing solution.
The reasons are not difficult to understand. Rents have increased significantly in many parts of the UK, while the cost of buying a home remains out of reach for many people. For some tenants, sharing is no longer about saving money for a short period before buying or moving on. It is simply the most practical way to secure good-quality accommodation in a location where they want to live.
And that changes the relationship between tenant and landlord.
A 35-year-old tenant is likely to approach renting differently from someone renting their first room at 22. They may have a demanding job, a busy family life or simply less tolerance for processes that feel unnecessarily complicated.
They expect things to work
They expect communication to be straightforward. They expect applications and verification to be handled quickly. They expect documents to be available when they need them and questions to be answered without endless emails and phone calls.
Most importantly, they increasingly expect the technology involved in renting a property to reflect the technology they use everywhere else in their lives.
Consider the contrast. People can open a bank account from their phone, verify their identity digitally, sign contracts electronically, order goods for next-day delivery and manage almost every aspect of their lives online. Yet parts of the rental process can still involve scanning documents, sending emails back and forth, chasing references and waiting for someone to confirm that paperwork has been received.
For tenants, that can feel remarkably out of step with the rest of the world. This is one of the reasons the way technology is designed for the rental market matters.
The challenge is not simply to digitise an existing process. Moving a paper form onto a website does not necessarily make renting better. The real opportunity is to remove unnecessary friction altogether. That is particularly relevant to shared housing.
When a property has multiple tenants, the potential for administrative complexity increases. Each person may need to provide identification, references, financial information and other documentation. A landlord or agent then has to manage that information, keep track of progress and make sure the right people have completed the right steps.
For a busy professional looking for a room, a process that takes days rather than minutes can be frustrating. For a landlord managing multiple properties, the administrative burden can become significant.
This is where platforms such as tlyfe are trying to make a difference.
The principle is relatively simple: verification and onboarding should be as quick and straightforward as possible, regardless of whether someone is 22 and renting their first room or 35 and sharing a house because the economics of the housing market make it the sensible choice.
The technology should not make assumptions about the tenant.
A shared house does not necessarily mean a shared-house lifestyle in the traditional sense. The people living there may be accountants, consultants, teachers, engineers, entrepreneurs, healthcare professionals or managers. They may be working remotely, travelling for work and managing increasingly busy lives.
What they have in common is that they are still tenants.
And tenants increasingly judge their entire rental experience by the quality of the process surrounding it.
That creates an opportunity for landlords and agents. Technology should not be viewed simply as a back-office efficiency tool. Done properly, it can become part of the customer experience.
Faster verification can reduce void periods. Better communication can reduce unnecessary enquiries. Digital records can make administration easier to manage. A smoother onboarding process can make a property more attractive to prospective tenants.
There is also a wider lesson here
The age profile of renters is changing, and the property industry needs to change with it. The assumption that renters are predominantly young people who will accept clunky systems because they have little experience of the market is increasingly outdated. The modern renter is more likely to be digitally confident, time-poor and commercially aware.
They know what good digital service looks like because they experience it every day. That means the question for landlords and agents is no longer simply, “Does our rental process work?”
It is increasingly, “Is our rental process good enough for the people we are asking to use it?” The average shared-house tenant being 35 is therefore more than an interesting statistic. It is a signal that the rental market is evolving.
The shared house has changed, the tenant has changed and expectations have changed
The technology used to bring landlords and tenants together needs to change too. Whether 35 is exactly the average age across the whole UK market is perhaps less important than what the number represents: sharing is no longer exclusively a young person’s solution.
People are renting for longer, making different housing choices and expecting professional standards from the businesses providing that accommodation.
For the property industry, that should be a wake-up call. A tenant’s age may have changed. Their expectations certainly have. And increasingly, there is very little excuse for making them wait.”
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