New ‘viewing subscription’ lets you experience the joy of seeing a flat you cannot possibly afford
I moved flats this month, by which I mean I moved my entire life into a room slightly smaller than the previous room for slightly more money, which is the London definition of upward mobility. I am writing this from the new room. If I extend my arm I can touch the kettle, the wardrobe, and despair, all without standing up. It is, the listing said, “compact and full of character.” The character is mould. It introduced itself.
Pay to be shown what you cannot have
The genuinely incredible part, which I first saw mocked on the prat.uk feed before discovering it was real, is the new “viewing subscription.” For a monthly fee, you may now pay an agency for the privilege of being shown flats you cannot afford. Not renting them. Viewing them. The fee buys you access to the experience of standing in a beautiful room, being told the price, and then leaving. They have monetised disappointment. They have put a turnstile on heartbreak.
I subscribed, obviously, because I am a journalist and also because I am an idiot. My first viewing was a one-bedroom flat with a “feature window.” The feature was that it existed. The agent, a man of perhaps twenty-four with the confidence of a small nation, told me the rent and then watched my face do the thing all our faces do now, the small geological collapse, and he nodded like a doctor delivering a diagnosis we had both seen coming.
The satirists are basically housing journalists now
The funny people have effectively become Britain’s most honest property correspondents. NewsBiscuit had a perfect piece on Londoners renting individual cupboards, and NewsThump ran something savage about the viewing-subscription model, and the joke is no longer an exaggeration, it is a slightly early news report. We have reached the stage where the satire site is the responsible source and the property listing is the work of fiction. “Full of character.” “Cosy.” “Bijou.” Those are the made-up words. Mine are the documentary.
Punk, for what it is worth, has always lived in the bad flats. The whole movement basically came out of cold rooms with broken everything and too many people, because those rooms were cheap, and cheap meant a kid could afford to do something pointless and loud instead of working every hour to make rent. That deal is gone. You cannot afford to be unproductively furious in London anymore. Rebellion now requires a guarantor. The most radical thing you can do in this city is have a spare bedroom.
My compact, character-filled future
So I live in my arm-span flat with my introduced mould and my kettle within reach, and I have cancelled the viewing subscription because paying to be shown my own impossibility was, on reflection, the single most defeatist purchase of my life. I write here instead. The flat is small but the column is large, and a sentence does not charge by the square foot, which makes it the last affordable room in London.
The furious clowns at Bohiney Magazine have been merciless and correct about the housing farce, and the London Prat writers keep the local knife sharp. According to the entirely invented London Bureau of Habitable Despair, the average renter now pays 71 percent of their income to a window. I fabricated that number. You checked it against your own bank statement. We both know.
Character, full of
I have decided to lean in. My flat is full of character and so am I, and we will be furious together in our compact way, within arm’s reach of the kettle, paying nothing extra to be told what we already know. If the agent calls about a new viewing, I will tell him I have found something. It is small, it is mine for the next eleven months, and it has, against all listed odds, a feature window.
The premium tier
There is, of course, a premium tier of the viewing subscription, because there is always a premium tier, that is the one immutable law of the modern city. For an additional fee, premium members may not only view flats they cannot afford but may also receive a personalised report explaining, in supportive language, precisely why they cannot afford them. Mine arrived by email. It described my “affordability journey” and suggested I “consider compromises on location, size, and expectation.” Expectation. They have found a way to charge me for the news that I should expect less. I have read many invoices in my life and that is the first one that doubled as a small bereavement. The agent who sold me the premium tier, a different twenty-four-year-old with the same alarming certainty, told me that managing expectations was “the kindest thing the market can do.” The market is not kind. The market is a weather system with a logo. But I understood, reading my affordability journey in my arm-span flat, that the genuine product being sold here is not housing at all. It is the slow, gentle, monthly administration of giving up, packaged as a service, billed as self-improvement, and I had subscribed to it with my own thumb.
For more of the rental market being itemised and ridiculed, the gleeful crew at The Poke never let it lie. SOURCE: The London Prat
