The Great Apartment Hunt of 2014, Part II: Dog-Unfriendly London

Who wouldn’t want this little creature?

 

After we narrowed down the neighborhood range, we started going to apartment showings. At first I casually mentioned to agents that we had a dog, but 2 things quickly became evident:

1) Your average letting agent doesn’t have enough information about an apartment to know if it will accept a dog
2) Most apartments in central London will not accept a dog

#1 is due to a combination of dog restrictions at multiple levels and agent disorganization, possibly exacerbated by laziness. In order for a given flat to accept a dog, first the owner of the apartment must allow a dog. This isn’t too difficult; usually they just seem to want an extra 2 weeks deposit. If the flat is a freehold, this should be the only hurdle.

However, most flats in central London are leaseholds, meaning that the “owner” has a proprietary lease from a freeholder who actually owns the ground and common area of the building. If this is the case, the owner’s lease agreement with the freeholder must allow dogs, which is much less common. In one case, the freehold did not allow dogs, but there was the possibility of getting that changed if ALL of the leaseholders agreed. This, of course, was impossible to coordinate.

Your average letting agent does not have access to the necessary information about whether a dog is allowed, so they can’t or don’t bother to filter properties based on this requirement.  That means that we saw a lot of places that didn’t actually allow dogs, which was a huge waste of time.  Even when we asked ahead of time about dogs, the agents would only check with the landlord, while the primary restriction was really at the freehold level.  This was hugely annoying, and something to watch out for if you’re house-hunting with a dog in central London.

#2 seems to be cultural and particular to central London. We had heard that dog ownership was perfectly common in the UK. However, this appears to be true only on the outskirts of London through to the countryside; central London is quite dog unfriendly. Most flats are rented furnished, and the owners of the furniture don’t want dogs on their furniture for obvious reasons. Still, even unfurnished places mostly did not allow dogs. All told, I would estimate that 90-95% of flats I inquired about do not allow dogs.

Next part in the series: actual apartments!

 

The Great Apartment Hunt of 2014, Part I: Neighborhoods

So far, the main thing we’ve done in London has been to look for an apartment (yes, they call it a flat, but everybody knows the word apartment too).  London is a sprawling city, with myriad small to medium neighborhoods, many overlapping and provoking disagreement about their borders from any two people you ask.

Oh, and the post codes: unlike in the States, where your zip code only means something to your mail carrier, the post codes here are split into several chunks, and serve as a rough but useful approximation of where a place can be found.  We’re currently staying in EC3N 1NT, but if you take just the EC3 part and refer to the map, you can see that it identifies an Eastern Central district.

The main areas we’ve wound up focusing on are E1 and N1, but we’re also looking in EC1 and 2 and possibly NW1.  Most of the traditionally “nice” neighborhoods in London are to the West – WC1, WC2, W1, W2, SW1, NW1, etc.  The names are familiar to any watcher of Hugh Grant movies – Chelsea, Notting Hill, South Kensington, Knightsbridge.  Those are all quite expensive, and not quite what we wanted.

The Chocolate Studios in Shoreditch

Instead, we’re looking for some place that feels like Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where we’ve just moved from – good shops and restaurants, with an active feel, but not too “posh,” expensive, pretentious, or buttoned-up.  So far, we’ve liked Shoreditch and Islington the best.  Some parts of Shoreditch feel like Rivington Street in the Lower East Side in New York (bad), some feel more like Bedford Ave in Williamsburg (better).  Islington is more like Boerum Hill, and would be our ideal area if we could find a place near the “high street” (main drag/shopping area), but so far we haven’t had much luck there. Prices are definitely higher in Islington than in Shoreditch, but the types of places are very different, too – Islington is full of charming old converted townhouses and shopfronts, Shoreditch has warehouse lofts and tenements.

Islington Upper Street

We’re also considering a place in King’s Cross, a more “up-and-coming” neighborhood around St. Pancras Station in N1 situated between Islington and Camden.  We considered Camden, an area that feels a lot like the East Village, but there’s only a small area that feels adult enough for us and there’s not much availability there.

We’ve looked at about 20 places at this point, with another 8 coming up later today. There are differences from NY:

• it’s even more expensive here
• everything is more spread out, adding more of a premium for close proximity to a high street or a tube stop
• agents work for the landlords, not the renters – this means the landlord pays them (good!) but each one has different availability and the market is highly fragmented (not so good)
• oddly, there’s less of a premium on 2BRs over 1BRs than in NY

I could go on and on, but I’m going to break this up into multiple posts so it doesn’t get overwhelming.  More soon!