Median Monthly Rent for Private 2-Bed Properties (2020)
London's private rental market is large and complex, with rent forming a large part of the the cost of living for many Londoners. How does rent vary across the city, and have there been any changes across the last year, particularly as lockdown and social restrictions from the COVID-19 pandemic may have made some rental areas less attractive and some more so?
Rents often parallel house prices as landlords seek to offset mortgage costs and maximise their profits, so the characteristic 'prime central London' of super-expensive apartments in much of Zone 1 are replicated in high rents, while rates fall moving away from the accessible centre towards less well connected suburbs.
But there are some anomalies as the map above of median monthly rents charged on private 2-bed properties by postcode district shows. Hotspots for rental prices in outer London include IG7 which covers Chigwell (mainly outside of Greater London but with a small part inside), E20 (the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park) with its post-games apartment complexes, and E16 (Thames-side Newham) which has also seen much apartment building recently. Hayes in west London is also a region of higher rents than its surrounding areas, possibly due to the proximity of Heathrow Airport.
N.B. Some areas, including the very centre of London (WC and EC postcodes) have no data, as these areas have relatively few private 2-bed properties available for residential rent.
The data used in these maps was published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) as a result of a Freedom of Information Request by the Greater London Authority ('City Hall') which regularly publishes the data as an interactive map. The data shown on both maps covers January to December 2020, the comparison map comparing with data from January to December 2019. Postcode districts with data on less than 10 private rents for two-bed properties, do not have their data published, and are shown as blank on the maps above. Postcode districts are from the UK Postcode Polygons project which uses OS Open Data, contains Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail data © Crown copyright and database right 2020.