Nine in 10 young flat sharers say they’ve lived with a ‘horror housemate’

Piles of dirty dishes. Food with your name on it, half-eaten. Music blasted aloud at 3am while you’re trying to sleep.

We’ve all had bad housemates – and Millie Thomas, 25, knows the feeling all too well.

Her flatmate’s biggest offence? The need to crank the thermostat down to 0°C, even during winter.

The veterinary nurse is among the nine in 10 young flat-sharers who have lived with a ‘housemate horror’, according to a new survey by Barclays.

The findings released today show that nine in 10 Millennial and Gen Z renters have clashed over shared-space etiquette.

Three in 10 of the 2,000 surveyed report issues with roommates playing music out loud and leaving towers of dirty dishes in the sink.

Millie lived for a year with four others in a house in Gloucester, with her in the ground-floor bedroom and the others upstairs.

Living together made complete sense – the five-bed house became just £500 each in rent, which included utilities like water and electricity.

Yet Millie noticed that one of her roommates ‘had this thing’ that switching on the heating would force the landlord to up their rent.

Millie, from Newport, Wales, tells Metro: ‘Every single day, she would turn the thermostat down to zero.

‘It was so cold – at night, I could see my breath in my bedroom and slept with five blankets as I would wake up shivering.’

‘She’d even put sticky notes on it saying “leave it on zero”.

‘The thermostat was outside my bedroom, so I’d wait for her to turn it down to zero and go up the stairs so I could sneak out and turn it back up.’

While not a ‘confrontational’ person, she did try to talk her roommate into cranking up the heat, only to be shot down.

‘I would spend ages plotting how to beat her – I could take the cover of the thermostat off, set it to 18°C and glue the cover back on so it looked like it was zero,’ Millie says.

But not all share-house dramas are just fights over where the TV remote is. One in five young house-sharers has lived with a ‘Nocturnal Gamer’, whose late-night sessions disturb others.

Nearly two in 10 live with a ‘Persistent Puffer’, who regularly vapes or smokes indoors. Around the same live with a ‘WhatsApp Micromanager’, who blasts the flat group chat with titchy reminders.

‘Permanent Plus-ones’, meanwhile, are the overnight guests who don’t pay any bills that nearly three in 10 young people have endured.

For many young people, a roommate (or four) is a necessary evil. Rent costs have been spiralling for years and reached a record high of £1,385 per month, a 3.1% increase from October last year.

In London, rent bills are even higher at £2,736 per month.

Rents are expected to be hiked up – again – by landlords in response to the Renters’ Rights Bill by 6%, which will cap rent raises to once a year.

The deposit needed to buy a home doesn’t come cheap, either, with the average first-time buyer deposit in 2024 being £61,090.

As much as house-shares make sense when you’re fresh out of university or in a new city, Barclays found that irritating roomies are putting young people off the arrangement altogether.

Two-thirds would rather pay more to live solo, and seven in 10 are now even more determined to buy their own home.

Six in 10 Gen Z and Millennial house-sharers, fed up with communal living, plan to leave their current house-share within the next 12 months.

And Millie did precisely that when her year-long contract came to an end, with her housemates all agreeing to part their separate ways.

Her roommate woes are one of the reasons that Millie decided to buy a home with her husband in Wales earlier this year.

‘I had the viewpoint that renting is a trap,’ she says. ‘My brother was renting in Bristol with three others, paying almost £2,000.

‘We would never have been able to escape the rental market, trying to find a house in Bristol, we just wouldn’t be able to afford it.’

Jatin Patel, head of mortgages, savings and insurance at Barclays, said there’s a simple reason why young people feel this way.

He says: ‘It’s no surprise so many renters want to explore how they could buy a place of their own, but saving for a deposit is the main barrier they face.

‘While families often want to help, they can’t always afford to gift money, so Barclays Mortgage Boost bridges that gap, helping first-time buyers turn aspirations about ‘one day owning a place’ into a real plan for home ownership.’

The scheme takes into account family and friends’ income, so people can borrow more – they’ll join the mortgage, but not own the property.

It’s part of the bank’s new drive to help young people buy their first homes.

Millie might be a homeowner now, but she still lives with a few others.

‘We’ve got four guinea pigs,’ she says. ‘Strawberry Shortcake, Coconut and we’ve just rescued two more called Pumpkin and Butternut Squash.’

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