It is a challenging time for renters, with rental prices rocketing and demand far outweighing supply – a recent study revealed that for every 100 rental ads in Scotland, 197 people are looking for a room to rent.
And while renters face greater financial hurdles, they are also dealing with more problems with landlords. According to the UK Housing Ombudsman, landlords were issued a record number of complaint handling failure orders between July and September 2022, a 105% increase on the previous quarter.
With this in mind, Online Mortgage Advisor wanted to discover where in the UK and the wider world tenants are most and least satisfied with their landlords. They found that renters in both Glasgow and Edinburgh are some of the most dissatisfied in the UK, despite the implementation of rental controls in Scotland.
How did we do it?
We analysed 276,000 rent-related geotagged tweets across the UK, US, and Europe, as well as other OECD nations, using an academic tool called SentiStrength.
SentiStrength is an AI tool which detects positive and negative sentiment levels in short pieces of text and assigns them a score from 5 (extremely positive) to -5 (extremely negative).
SEE THE FULL STUDY HERE:
https://www.onlinemortgageadvisor.co.uk/content/rental-grievances/#home
Key findings
- Belfast is the UK city with the highest proportion of dissatisfied renters with 43.5% of tweets analysed recorded as negative, followed by Glasgow (41.7%) and Bradford (38.7%).
- Edinburgh came in at number 7 with 36.1%, meaning two Scottish cities appear in the top 10.
- The UK ranked 9th overall in the list of OECD countries with 34.8% tweets deemed as negative out of those surveyed, with Sweden, Denmark and Ireland occupying the top three spots.
- The most commonly mentioned words in negative tweets about rent were: “people”, “money” and “time”.
Renters in Glasgow and Edinburgh amongst the most dissatisfied in the UK
Using the academic tool SentiStrength, Online Mortgage Advisor analysed 276,000 geotagged tweets related to renting to find out which cities had the least satisfied renters.
- Belfast, is the city with the most dissatisfied renters in the country with 43.5% of all rent-related tweets being recorded as negative.
- Glasgow, ranks 2nd with 41.7% of tweets made by renters in the area being recorded as negative.
- Edinburgh came in at number 7 with 36.1%.
This means that two Scottish cities appear in the top 10 of our analysis, despite Scotland implementing a rent freeze at 0% from September 2022 until March 2023. The Scottish government then increased this to a cap of 3% in most instances from April 2023. Find the ranking below:
| UK cities which are least satisfied with their rental experiences | ||
|---|---|---|
| Rank | City | Negative tweets (%) |
| 1 | Belfast | 43.5% |
| 2 | Glasgow | 41.7% |
| 3 | Bradford | 38.7% |
| 4 | Bristol | 38.3% |
| 5 | Brighton & Hove | 37.4% |
| 6 | Sheffield | 36.5% |
| 7 | Edinburgh | 36.1% |
| 8 | Nottingham | 35.9% |
| 8 | Plymouth | 35.9% |
| 10 | Birmingham | 35.2% |
The most common rental grievances
We found it was ‘people’ that tenants take issue with most frequently, with 60 mentions for every 1,000 tweets. Issues range from landlords turning up unannounced to fellow tenants failing to pay their share of the rent and never taking the bins out. The second and third most commonly listed complaints referred to ‘money’ and ‘time’.
Here are a few of the issues people have voiced on twitter:
See the full study here:
https://www.onlinemortgageadvisor.co.uk/content/rental-grievances/#home
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