The High Street Agent Problem in London

What the letting industry still costs us — and why we built something different

When we started what became Housefolk — then The Letting Circle — in Hackney, we were trying to solve a problem we kept encountering. The homes with the most character, the landlords with the most genuine investment in their properties and their tenants, and the people looking for somewhere real to live were consistently failing to find each other. The intermediaries in between were not facilitating connection. They were taxing it.

Walk down any high street in Hackney and you will find them: the frosted-glass offices, the laminated property cards, the letting agents in metallic suits who seem perpetually on the phone. They have been a feature of London's rental landscape for decades, and for most of that time they have operated with near-total impunity — extracting fees from landlords, inflating rents for tenants, and presenting the whole arrangement as the natural order of things.

In a borough full of interesting landlords with interesting properties, and full of people looking for somewhere worth living, the thing connecting them was a high street agency charging 20% for the privilege — and inflating the asking rent on top, just to signal its own usefulness. A tax on connection, paid ultimately by the tenant. During a housing crisis, what’s more.

So we built a weekly email newsletter. Upload the photos, write honestly about the place, send it to people who've asked to receive it. By removing the management cut charged by traditional agencies, more money stays with landlords — which means more room to price fairly, invest in the property, and build the kind of relationship with a place that actually sustains a neighbourhood over time.

But we have always believed that the numbers are only part of it.

There is something about a home that resists reduction to yield and percentage points. The way a particular kitchen catches afternoon light. A garden that someone has tended for fifteen years. The knowledge that your neighbours are living there and not holidaying — that someone thought about what kind of household this might be, rather than simply processing applications in order of receipt. These things have value, and they are precisely what gets stripped out when housing becomes purely transactional.

The problem for landlords using letting agents

In 2026, the gap between what lettings agencies cost and what they actually provide has never been more legible. London landlords using a full property management service with a traditional high street agent typically pay between 12% and 20% of monthly rental income. On a flat letting for £2,000 a month — which is normal in E8 — that is up to £400 disappearing before the landlord has replaced a bulb or fixed a boiler. And that's before the renewal fees, inventory charges, maintenance mark-ups, and administrative extras that can push the real cost closer to 18–22% once everything is tallied.

These fees do not vanish into the ether. They pass through the landlord and into the rent — contributing, alongside speculative listing prices, to the kind of market that has systematically pushed people out of neighbourhoods they helped build.

The inflation machine

Research from lettings platform Hello Neighbour found that traditional high street agents in London inflate advertised rents on new listings by around 15%. The theory — and it is not a flattering one — is that agents overprice at the listing stage as a strategy to win landlord business: a higher asking rent signals competence, regardless of what the market will actually bear. By the time reality corrects itself, the anchor has been set, and the next comparable property is priced against an already-inflated baseline.

This is how a neighbourhood loses itself. Not through one dramatic moment, but through the slow accumulation of small distortions — each one unremarkable, each one compounding the last.

Housefolk exists as a response to that: a smaller, quieter, more considered way to let and to find homes. The landlords in our network have chosen not to use a high street agent. That choice, by itself, tells you something about them — and about the kind of homes they're offering.