How to live rent FREE in Central London!

In order to live completely rent free in Central London, you need to rent a 2 or 3 bedroom apartment, live in one of the rooms, and rent out the remaining room(s). You market the room(s) on portals such as Airbnb and Booking.com and then put in systems to automate the process so you don't have to do much at all.

The end result: an apartment in Central London where you aren't paying any rent.

Step 1: Rent an apartment

The first thing you need to do is to rent a 2 bedroom apartment (assuming you will only be living in one of the bedrooms) in the area you want to live in. Ideally, areas, where the rents are cheaper, will work better than areas with really high rents.

So something like Camden could work better than something like Oxford Circus as the rents are a lot cheaper.

This 2 bedroom apartment in Camden is available to rent for ￡445 per week.

That works out to be ￡1928 per month (￡445 *4.33 weeks).

Step 2: List the apartment on Airbnb and Booking.com

You then make an account on Airbnb and Booking.com and list one of the bedrooms as a 'Private room'.

This private room is listed in Camden for ￡80 per night.

If you check into the calendar on the bottom right-hand side, you can see how often this private room is booked out.

For the rest of June, the apartment is fully booked.

For the month of July, 30 of the 31 nights have been booked. So the rate is close to 100% in July.

According to a recent article by Relocate Global, the average occupancy in London was 83.8 percent. If you were able to achieve 80% occupancy in your apartment, that would mean 24 nights booked in the month.

So your total revenue at ￡80 per night * 24 nights = ￡1920.

Rent paid: ￡1928.

The total cost of living: ￡1928 - ￡1920 = ￡8.

a 2 bedroom apartment, you would have to pay bills of around ￡250 per month. So your total cost to live in a Central London would be ￡8 + ￡250 = ￡258.

(Scroll to the bottom to see how to live completely rent free!)

Step 3: Automate

By using various different apps and software, you can then automate all the daily operations of running the apartment so it only takes you about 10 min to run this apartment.

(In a future post I will go through all the systems required for this)

Things to consider

• Rent a 3 bedroom apartment and rent 2 of the rooms

The cost of renting a 3 bedroom apartment is ￡550 per week. That comes to ￡2383 per month. You will then need to pay bills of around ￡300 per month. So grand total comes to ￡2683 per month.

If the rooms made ￡1341 each per month, so at ￡80 per night, that's 17 nights a month booked, which is only 56% occupancy (a lot lower than the previous 80%!) you would be able to live completely rent free!

• Get approval from your landlord or letting agent before you start to rent out the additional rooms. I believe, there is not planning restrictions in order to rent the additional rooms but you might still need consent from your landlord/ lettings agent.
• Demand in Central London tends to be higher in summer months and gets quieter months. Consider letting out of the room(s) on a long-term basis during the winter months in order to cover your costs.