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Earlier this year, soon after leaving university and planning a move to London for a four-month internship — too brief to take a full year’s lease — I was on the hunt for a room to rent. My Facebook and SpareRoom searches had been underwhelming at best: a living room-turned-bedroom that flatmates crossed to access the kitchen, a live-in landlord who required meals cooked for him on weekends and a FaceTime viewing with a landlady who kept tripping over her eight cats.
Despairing, I discussed my predicament with a close friend. “Aren’t you looking on Instagram?” she said. “Everyone is subletting their rooms on there.”
As rental costs spiral — up 21 per cent in three years according to Zoopla — Gen Z is turning to Instagram for short-term lets. It’s a rich visual medium to show homes at their best, combined with the chance to peek inside the lives of potential housemates. Such is the appetite that one specialist account, @friends0ffriendz, launched its own app earlier this year.
All this I discovered when, returning to my near-inactive account — courtesy of a bad break-up a few years ago — I saw that things had changed. One in 10 stories from accounts I followed were advertising a room (theirs or a friend’s). Suddenly I was dazzled by William Morris wallpaper, Le Creuset pots, a garden (luxury enough, I assure you).
I could cat-sit “Charlie Mittens” in a leafy house near Hampstead Heath (very appealing) or take a race car-themed bedroom in someone’s childhood home (less so). Offers ranged from a few days while someone was on holiday to taking over a year’s tenancy.
Best of all, these were people I knew — sort of. Rather than kooky cat ladies or strangers who overused the crying-with-laughter emoji, these were my people.
Except they were more glamorous. Within a few hours, I had DM’d a twenty-something fellow English graduate, for a month in her room in a Victorian town house in Stoke Newington. The room was large, had the requisite exposed-brick walls, wooden flooring, full-length windows and was — for this highly desirable spot — extremely well priced.
Scrolling through her account, I discovered she was a successful start-up founder — posing with Forbes’ 30 under 30 cohort, joking with Keir Starmer — and was off to LA for the next round of seed funding for her app. Of course she was subletting on Instagram.
I moved in, embracing my new fantasy life. There was the blue-tiled kitchen, replete with a dishwasher and air fryer, Bauhaus posters and housemates glowing with health who ran marathons on weekends. “Help yourself to anything,” one — a trainee lawyer — beamed (somewhat ironically, since the fridge was empty save for bone broth and low-cal cheese). I strolled around the park down the road, visited the bakery for crème brûlée cookies and even shared a commute with one of my new housemates.
After a month, come time to move, I was back on Instagram. That’s when I stumbled on @friends0ffriendz. Launched in 2019 by Oliver Rhys Henderson and Joseph Thew, it is the cutting edge of Insta-letting, luring users with an endless grid of desirable rooms, which you like and message to register your interest as if on a dating site (its previous logo showed a Cupid in a heart). The account now has 67,000 followers. “If someone’s on Instagram you can see everything about them, everything they do,” Henderson explained to me recently.
I found it full of beautiful house shares and tenants that a recent graduate should surely be friends with. Short-film makers, photographers, fashion designers. I scrolled the pictures of “creative queer warehouse spaces”, mezzanine kitchens and bedrooms with an abundance of houseplants.
I rattled off wittily composed DMs aiming for just the right balance of enthusiasm and nonchalance. Soon I found a match and was visiting a converted pub flat, being sublet by a food writer. Upon my arrival he proudly showed me a photo of the outside of the flat with a Perelló olive tin visible on the living room windowsill, which had featured on a popular east London meme account. With seemingly few higher blessings of cool, I took it on the spot.
This time there were some wrinkles. “A few summer clothes” that he had asked to leave behind turned out to be half a wardrobe’s-worth of bundled shirts and linen suits. When a friend planned to stay for a couple of days, I was told I wasn’t allowed guests. But with the flat’s library of cookbooks, stainless steel kitchen and collection of infused cooking oils, I didn’t care. I was thrilled — the satisfaction of my aspirations for London life and a sense of belonging rolled into one.
Of course, all those crème brûlée cookies and matcha lattes had me living beyond my intern’s wage. But as flings go, it was short and sweet. Because, like some dating apps, that’s what these Instagram and subletting apps are best for: a brief dalliance. At the end of the summer, now with a permanent job and money for the deposit on a long-term rental, I was relieved to find somewhere more stable — found the old-fashioned way, through an estate agent.
But, for the homes — and the people — it had been worth it. Where else could I have gone for a crash course in the must-have niche brands, how to photograph a Negroni and a connoisseur’s guide to London’s best pornstaches?
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