London Shared

We rent properties directly from landlords for fixed long-term tenancies, effectively taking over responsibility for the property and managing it on the landlord's behalf. We fully furnish the properties and pay all the bills (including weekly cleaners), and then we provide rooms to working professionals on 6-month contracts. When the history of London property gets written, we'd definitely like to be seen as the early visionaries of shared accommodation, the first to really "get it right". We are not an estate agency, and we don't have those conflicts of interest. We're managers, really. The basic model is simple enough: we lease a 4 or 5 bedroom house from a landlord on a 3-year agreement, and then we rent out the rooms to working professionals. We do all the hard work so the landlord doesn't have to. For residents, it's a new-and-improved "2.0" version of communal London living. For instance, all of our rooms have flat-screen TVs and free Wi-Fi, and we send a cleaner weekly. For young professionals concentrating on making their mark in the Big Smoke, it takes away a lot of hassle not to have to sit around the kitchen table figuring out who owes what for the heating.