Are living rooms becoming an endangered species in shared homes?

Really interesting and informative article.

I'm not surprised that house sharers don't place a high priority on having a lounge.

I have never lived in or owned an HMO, or even a house or flat share where everyone has equal legal status as joint owners or tenants. However, I do have plenty of experience (both personal and through extensive research for my website) of spare room letting, both as the live in landlord and the lodger.

If you're renting a room, the only part of the property you can really call your own space - and sometimes not even that - is your room, so human nature being as it is, you contract into that space. This obviously becomes much less as you feel more comfortable and at home with your fellow housemates and integrate more with them.

Perhaps sadly, a lodger who was a colleague that we let a room to wanted to spend nearly all her time at home in her room, and later when I rented a spare room from a long term friend, I found myself doing the same. This might well be a factor in why both of those friendships ended over the room lets!

I've always included a living room in my shared houses. Call me a sentimental old fuddy-duddy, but I think it's important to have space in addition to the kitchen so that tenants feel they can have friends around to visit without obliging them to cram into their bedroom, and so they have spare to interact with their fellow housemates rather than sit isolated in their own cubicles. There's also the minor issue that if you cram the houseshare with more and more tenants, the kitchen and bathroom(s) are overwhelmed.

Reply to the comment left by "Tony Atkins" at "19/11/2014 - 12:29":

Hi Tony

Do you tend to let a whole property to groups who already know each other, or on an individual room basis?

Do your tenants use the lounge much to interact with each other, as opposed to just using it when they have visitors or when they can get the lounge to themselves?

Where a lodger is concerned, although a lodger will mostly stick to their room, I believe that excluding your lodger from your lounge sends a very negative message and would ring alarm bells for me if I were looking for a room to rent.

Too often we found our 2 persons renting our 2 bed flat were then subletting the lounge for a 3rd bedroom, so a few years ago we changed to renting to 3 persons with no lounge thereby creating more economical accommodation for those that needed it as then not only is the rent shared but so are all bills. We could then be assured that we knew who our tenants were as we were unhappy about the sublet situation.

After a quick straw poll here in the office, the opinion is that 15 - 20% of HMOs have a shared room, though indeed some of them do not look well used.

If the residents are mates or students it seems to be more important.

Reply to the comment left by "Mandy Thomson" at "19/11/2014 - 12:41":

I let on an individual room basis as I find groups only form amongst students or where there is a strong incentive, for example in cities like London or Oxford, where there is very high demand for houseshares and people need to act quickly. Single people elsewhere find it very hard to find other people to buddy up with, or aren't that bothered because there is a floating consistent level of supply and demand for shared accommodation, so they can come and go as their job and relationship situation changes.

In any group there tends to be one or two tenants who are heavier TV or gaming users and prefer to watch in a lounge as it's larger than their bedroom. Some of the others tend to stick to their rooms; others vary, sometimes seeking company in the living room, sometimes not. Programmes like X-Factor, Gogglebox and Strictly seems to pull people together, just like students watching Neighbours or Eastender in university common rooms. In my view the lounge helps pull a household together in ways that separate lockable rooms and merely a shared kitchen never do: it helps make the house more cohesive, the tenants become friends, and more inclined to stay.

If you provide a separate living room, tenants sub-let it. Thats why we just make the kitchen bigger and call it an open-plan kitchen-lounge

Similar to Tony Atkins, my HMO's have a shared lounge and kitchen / diner. Both to a reasonably high spec with sky TV's, BB etc. These spaces are useful if I require to meet the tenants as a group and for them to get together with mates etc. they do not sublet the lounge. I do monthly visits and additional visits on communal areas. Any subletting would be against the AST T&C's and their failure to recognise these would see them receiving an S21. Compromising my HMO license would be unacceptable and I have a zero tolerance approach to dealing with such issues. If there are as many tenants seeking rooms as implied why are so many landlords letting their tenants sublet communal spaces as implied?

Reply to the comment left by "Rob Crawford" at "19/11/2014 - 16:06":

I agree with Rob: I would crack down really hard if the tenants tried to sub-let the lounge, just as I would do if a tenant moved out without telling me and the others moved a couple into a single bedroom. Sub-letting is not allowed in my ASTs (a standard NLA one plus my own clauses).

Frankly I don't think my tenants would want to sub-let the lounge anyway: they like having a lounge, and it's a feature of the house, along with the kitchen-diner, the off-road parking and the large garden. They've had enough of living in student halls of residence and want to live in a proper house with home-like space and facilities.

Of course it all depends on the nature of the property, its location and the attitude of the pool of potential tenants. A Victorian bay-fronted terrace in a central location with limited street parking but with the option of walking and a good bus network to work and leisure facilities is a quite different proposition from more spacious suburban locations where the car dominates.

Reply to the comment left by "Tony Atkins" at "19/11/2014 - 14:55":

Thanks, Tony. You said, "it helps make the house more cohesive, the tenants become friends, and more inclined to stay", absolutely! Unfortunately, where letting to a lodger is concerned, the opposite often happens - they often start out as friends, then the lodger sticks mostly to their room, the friendship changes into a landlord/lodger relationship, and resentment sets in on both sides - the landlord gets fed up with having someone else in their home, finds some fault with the lodger, pulls rank as landlord and householder, and the lodger resents this, especially if they were friends.

The best lodger landlords are those who foster a house share arrangement, and are prepared to be friendly toward the lodger and treat them as an equal housemate day to day - yet at the same time they're still the landlord - a very fine line to thread, so picking the right lodger is crucial.