Illegal HMO advertised on rental platform Spotahome also a ‘fire hazard’
Six bedroom apartment in London features no lounge, a single toilet and a small kitchen as well as a radiator that pokes through a wall.
A property available to rent on rental platform Spotahome and marketed via Zoopla ‘spectacularly’ fails to meet guidance on minimum room size and health and safety, it has been claimed.
An anonymous blogger has highlighted the property, revealing that the six-bedroom ‘spacious’ flat in London’s Isle of Dogs features at least four bedrooms which are smaller than local council Tower Hamlet’s minimum bedroom size rules.
The property also appears to really be a four-bedroom apartment where the lounge has been converted into two bedrooms, therefore making it an HMO. Rooms at the property are offered at £867 a month.
Tenants at the two-level flat who book accommodation at the property through Spotahome, which lists over 4,000 properties on Zoopla in London, must share a small kitchen with a table with room for just three people and a single bathroom.
Fire hazard
The converted lounge at the property also features a radiator that is bisected by the new and flimsy-looking partition wall that now runs through the room and which blogger Dodgy London Agents says ‘is a clear fire hazard’.
The property’s listings says it has been ‘checked’ by a Spotahome representative and includes a link to a video in which ‘Jonathan’ tours the property, at one point claiming with a nervous laugh that ‘half a radiator is common in London’.
Spotahome is unusual because it doesn’t allow property viewings and instead employs a small army of local representatives to complete video tours of each property.
Spotahome pitches itself as somewhere between Airbnb and a traditional letting agency and in October last year opened a London office, and this week recruited a former senior TripAdvisor executive, Amanda Symonds, as its Chief Growth Officer.
