How is the rental crisis so bad a six-figure winner is more worried about keeping her home than celebrating?

One of the reasons I started Raffle House was because I’d seen that it was becoming increasingly difficult for young people to get on the property ladder.

Around the time we launched back in 2018, research from Hometrack revealed that first-time buyers needed an average salary of £53,000 to buy their first home, rising to a whopping £82,000 in London.

Worse still, this figure had risen 18% in just three years, far above wage growth and putting the prospect of home ownership out of reach of many young people.

I thought if we offered the chance to win a property for a low – or even free – entry fee, it would appeal to many of those Millennials who despaired of ever having a place to call their own.

I was absolutely delighted when the very first winner of one of our properties – a two-bedroom London flat valued at £500,000 – was 27-year-old Niomi Boontam. She was half of a young couple who were renting with no immediate prospects of escaping Generation Rent. Then, in the midst of 2020’s pandemic, she suddenly became the owner of a mortgage-free property.

Generation can’t even rent?

But a call to a more recent prize winner made me realise how much worse things have gotten for this generation in the years between then and now – they’ve seemingly moved past worrying they can’t afford to buy to worrying they can’t afford to rent.

Calling prize winners to tell them they’ve won a big prize – the company’s draws have since expanded beyond houses to cash and other prizes – has always been one of my favourite parts of the job.

Indeed, I was in a fine mood as I prepared to deliver the good news to a player who had won our Bonus Draw prize of £10,000 a month for a year. I expected she’d be pretty excited to hear she’d won a prize totalling £120,000.

Instead, her first reaction was fear that her landlord would increase the rent on her SE England property to an unmanageable amount. Apparently, he’d put it up every year for the five years she’d been there and indicated a further rise was coming.

She begged me not to do any publicity around her prize as she was worried this meant the increase would be even more than usual – she told me she already suffered regular stress wondering if the next rise would be affordable or not. She said she hoped I’d understand she didn’t want to be at any risk of having to find a new place to live in what she called “today’s incredibly difficult” rental market.

Of course, she isn’t the first to want to keep her good fortune to herself. Over the years, I’ve heard all sorts of reasons for anonymity, ranging from “I’m sick and look too poorly to take a picture right now” to “I don’t want the girl I’m dating to find out”.

But the idea one of our prizes could have a negative impact on someone’s housing situation was a new one for me and quite concerning given the original mission of the company.

Obviously, I agreed to her anonymity request, but given we love to publicise our big wins, I suggested a voice note recording to convey her elation instead. But she was even averse to this, claiming her landlord might recognise her voice, put two and two together and up her rent.

This was undoubtedly the most bizarre reaction I’d ever had from a prize winner and suggested to me that the UK’s housing market must be well and truly broken if someone who has won a six-figure sum is still worried about how they will pay for their housing costs over the long term.

One would think that a £120,000 prize could only improve one’s housing prospects, perhaps even be enough for a deposit on a place to buy. Instead, this winner was concerned about having to find a new place to live.

Having since looked at the most recent statistics, her reaction seems somewhat understandable. According to Zoopla, the number of properties available to rent has dropped by 24% since 2019, leading to an average of 21 people competing for each property. In this context, it’s little wonder she wanted to hold on to her current home.

I started this company because it seemed to me the property market was broken in terms of buying homes; it now seems the market is in just as bad a shape when it comes to rentals. Let’s hope things can be turned around before we have to start offering a place to rent as a prize.

Benno Spencer is the CEO and founder of Raffle House. Prior to starting the company, he worked as Director of Oil Pricing at S&P Global.