In response to “Fan of true crime? Then this column is for you” by John Harris, The Guardian, 24 October 2025.
I don’t know if you read the John Harris article in The Guardian on Friday 24 October. I did, and I felt sick to my core.
It was not Harris’s darkly evocative language nor his stark descriptions of the living conditions his subject encountered, nor was it the appalling picture he managed to paint through his extraordinary writing…
It was simply because what he describes is a reality for so many. And it is a reality that good HMO agents are trying to banish to the pages of history.
Harris’s piece recounts the story of a woman named Eunice Osei, and you can read it here.
Eunice lives in an HMO property in respectable, leafy Bowes Park, in North London. Her life, however, fits into a single, cramped and overfull room; damp, mouldy, infested with mice, with a toilet that frequently blocks and floods, as she tries to get by with sub-standard furniture that’s falling apart.
And for this privilege, she pays £1,147 a month.
In Ipswich, for many a commuter town, the monthly rent for a room in a shared house usually falls between £475–£650pcm.
The landlord of this property had illegally converted a family home into 11 “units” one of which Eunice has rented. A landlord who had ignored repair requests, flouted the law, and profited from human misery. A landlord who had been fined £20,000 several years ago for similar offences, and yet had still managed to operate in abject violation of the laws which govern housing in this country.
As Harris points out in his startling article, this problem is sadly not limited to just one rogue landlord. The reality is, the system itself has allowed this to happen: a council – Haringey, in this instance… so often on the wrong end of an accusation of malfeasance that placed a tenant there; a legal framework with little to no enforcement; a housing crisis that leaves the most vulnerable with nowhere else to go.
It is shocking. It is shameful. And it is frankly exactly the reason why we do what we do.
At LEA Property Solutions, we manage HMOs… but not like this. Everything we do is designed to overturn exactly this reputation. You are disgusted. So am I.
At LEA, we believe that a shared property should be a home, not something more akin to a holding pen.
We believe that every tenant deserves respect, safety and dignity as a basic minimum.
We believe that our landlords and ourselves should profit for the facility and the service we provide; they are leveraging an investment asset, we are running a business. But nevertheless, we also truly believe that profit should never come before people’s wellbeing. These things are in no way mutually exclusive, and nor should they be.
Our golden rule is simple:
👉 If we wouldn’t live in a property ourselves, nor wish to see our loved ones live there, we will not take it on.
We inspect, maintain and manage every property we take on as if it were our own. We work only with landlords who share our values. We don’t just let out rooms in properties – we build communities… truly, these are households where people support one another and feel proud of where they live.
Of course, there are bad actors in the HMO world.
But there are also countless good ones – and I mean landlords and agents both, people – human beings, too – who care deeply; people who want to provide safe and welcoming homes because it is the right thing to do, not because a new law is coming in that makes it harder to avoid it. And what is astonishing is that this new law – and I refer to the Renters’ Rights Bill, soon to become the Renters’ Rights Act – is not even needed to tackle this problem. The law already protects against this, the law already prohibits what this landlord has done, the law already exists to prosecute bad players and support victims like Eunice; but enforcement seems entirely lacking.
Will the new law be enforced any better – that is a question we should all be asking.
Providing the very best quality shared homes for tenants is our mission here at LEA Property Solutions in Ipswich.
That’s the story we’re telling. That’s the standard we’re setting – but it is not us alone, either. The agents I know and work with in The HMO Network are HMO Agents who, just like me, share exactly this view and these core values.
Every tenant deserves better than what Eunice has endured.
And I literally will not rest until stories like hers are banished to those pages of history.
FAQ
What makes an HMO acceptable to LEA Property Solutions?
Licensed, safe, well-maintained homes with regular inspections, responsive repairs, and respectful, community-minded house rules.
How do you ensure problems are fixed quickly?
Clear SLAs with landlords and contractors; urgent issues triaged same day and 24/7 emergency line with HelpMeFix who we are partenered with.
Do you take on any HMO?
No. If a property doesn’t meet our standards, or if a landlord won’t commit to them, we won’t take it on. That is a matter of principle.