Squeezed In: How Brighton's Landlords Are Carving Up Homes — and What It's Costing Renters

There's a particular kind of estate agent photo you'll recognise if you've been flat-hunting in Brighton recently. The bedroom that's essentially a corridor with ambitions. The kitchen that doubles as a hallway. The living room where the sofa and the front door are on genuinely intimate terms. These aren't accidents of bad interior design. In many cases, they're the deliberate result of a landlord carving one property into two — or three — to extract as much rental income as possible from a city where demand never seems to slow down.

It's a trend that's been building quietly for years, but housing advocates say it's accelerating. And for the people actually living inside these subdivided spaces, the consequences go well beyond a slightly awkward furniture arrangement.

The Maths Behind the Squeeze

Let's start with the numbers, because they tell a clear story. A four-bedroom Victorian terrace in Hanover or Elm Grove might fetch around £2,200 a month as a single let. Split it into two self-contained flats — even modest ones — and a landlord could realistically pull in £1,400 per unit, netting upwards of £2,800 a month from the same building. That's a meaningful uplift, and it explains why planning portals across Brighton and Hove City Council are increasingly busy with applications to convert single dwellings into Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs) or separate flats.

What's driving this? A combination of factors, really. Rising mortgage rates have squeezed landlord margins, making yield optimisation feel less like greed and more like survival. Meanwhile, Brighton's rental vacancy rate remains stubbornly low, meaning there's almost always a queue of tenants willing to take whatever's available — even if "available" means a flat where you can touch both walls of the bathroom simultaneously.

What the Rules Actually Say

Subdividing a property isn't as simple as throwing up a partition wall, though plenty of landlords treat it that way. In Brighton and Hove, converting a single dwelling into two or more separate units typically requires planning permission, and any HMO with five or more occupants needs a mandatory licence from the council. Smaller HMOs — three to four people sharing — fall under additional licensing schemes that the council has extended across much of the city.

The trouble is enforcement. Brighton and Hove City Council's housing enforcement team is stretched, and unlicensed HMOs are far from rare. Housing charity Shelter has consistently flagged that many tenants in subdivided properties don't know their rights, and many landlords are banking on exactly that. Fire safety requirements, minimum room sizes, adequate ventilation — these aren't optional, but they're often the first casualties when a conversion is done on the cheap.

Solicitor and housing law advisor Priya Mehta, who works with a Brighton-based tenants' support group, puts it plainly: "We see people living in rooms that don't meet the legal minimum size for a sleeping space. They're paying market rate for something that technically shouldn't be rented as a bedroom at all. The problem is, when your alternative is sleeping on a friend's sofa, you take what you can get."

Life in a Subdivided Property

For many Brighton residents, subdivided housing isn't an abstract policy issue — it's just home. Jamie, 29, moved into a converted ground-floor flat in Preston Park last year after six months of searching. The flat was originally part of a larger family house; the landlord had sectioned off the front rooms, installed a compact kitchen in what was clearly once a dining room, and let the result as a one-bedroom flat.

"It's fine," Jamie says, with the specific tone of someone describing something that is not entirely fine. "The ceilings are high, which helps. But there's no natural light in the kitchen, the walls are thin enough that I can hear my upstairs neighbour's phone conversations, and there's a weird smell when it rains that I'm fairly sure is damp. I've reported it twice. Nothing's happened."

His experience is far from unique. Across Brighton's denser neighbourhoods — Kemptown, Moulsecoomb, parts of Hove — residents describe a similar pattern: properties that feel incomplete, where the conversion has prioritised unit count over liveability, and where maintenance issues are slow to be addressed because the landlord's priority was clearly getting tenants in, not keeping them comfortable.

The Council's Balancing Act

Brighton and Hove City Council is caught in an uncomfortable position. On one hand, it needs more housing units — the city's population is growing, and the waiting list for social housing is long. On the other, poorly managed subdivisions are quietly degrading the quality of the city's housing stock and concentrating vulnerable renters in substandard conditions.

The council's Local Plan includes policies designed to protect larger family homes from being broken up unnecessarily, and there are Article 4 Directions in several wards that remove permitted development rights, meaning more conversions require full planning permission. But critics argue these protections are inconsistently applied and that enforcement action, when it comes, is often too slow to make a real difference.

Local councillor and housing spokesperson Andrea Watts has acknowledged the tension: "We want to increase supply, but not at the cost of people's quality of life. The challenge is that the market moves faster than our planning system."

What Tenants Can Actually Do

If you're living in a subdivided property and something feels off, there are practical steps worth taking. First, check whether your landlord has the correct licences — Brighton and Hove's council website has a public register of licensed HMOs. If your property should be licensed and isn't, that's a serious breach, and you can report it to the council's private sector housing team.

Room size matters too. The legal minimum for a single adult sleeping in an HMO is 6.51 square metres. It sounds small, but a surprising number of converted rooms fall below it. If yours does, your landlord is in breach of HMO management regulations.

And if you're dealing with damp, inadequate heating, or fire safety concerns, the Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS) gives councils the power to require landlords to carry out repairs. Contacting the council's environmental health team — rather than just your landlord — often produces faster results.

The Bigger Picture

The subdivision trend isn't unique to Brighton, but it feels particularly acute here. This is a city where space has always been at a premium, where Victorian terraces weren't designed for the density we're now asking of them, and where the gap between what renters can afford and what the market demands keeps widening.

For every landlord making a rational financial decision, there's a tenant absorbing the consequences — less space, thinner walls, more neighbours, and a home that was never really designed to be what it's been turned into. That's not a sustainable foundation for a city that prides itself on being liveable, creative, and genuinely welcoming.

The storeroom metaphor feels apt here, and not in a good way. Too many Brighton renters are living in spaces that feel less like homes and more like places to store a person temporarily — functional enough to get by, but not really built for a life.