More than one in five HMO tenants felt unsafe at some point because of a housemate, new research released on 13 October shows. COHO’s State of Shared Living 2026, based on 5,145 current UK sharers, puts the figure at 21 percent, rising to 27 percent among tenants aged 45 and over.
The online survey ran from 7 May to 31 July 2026 across 47 towns and cities, alongside more than 1,200 written accounts. It lands as shared housing covers 482,788 HMOs across England and Wales, home to more than two million people, according to the National HMO Register cited in the report.
Empty rooms cost more than awkward house meetings. COHO says average shared tenancies stretch from six months to 18 months when housemates are matched on compatibility, while four in ten tenants would pay more to live with people they know will fit.
Moving in blind drives safety gap
Two in five tenants (42 percent) received no information about their housemates before moving in, and six in ten wish they had known more. More than half (53 percent) want greater say over who joins their household.
Men (22 percent) were slightly more likely than women (21 percent) to report feeling unsafe. The pattern points to information failure at letting stage rather than a single tenant group, with blind allocations leaving both new arrivals and sitting tenants exposed.
One case study underlines the commercial risk. Sam Taylor, 32, a business analyst who moved from Kent to Liverpool in May, said the advert promised a mixed house aged 21 to 35 but the reality was one man and four women in their early 20s who kept to themselves. “Landlords, agents and online platforms need to be much more transparent about the properties they advertise, including the condition of the home and who already lives there,” Taylor said, after handing in notice to move back south.
Compatibility links to longer tenancies
Sixteen percent of tenants would stay longer if consulted on who moves in. That retention signal matters against a tight market: SpareRoom reports UK room rents at a record 769 pounds as supply falls, which keeps demand high but also raises the cost of each void when a sharer leaves early.
Sharing is no longer a student stopgap in the data. More than 40 percent of respondents are aged 30 or over, 89 percent of that group are in paid work, and 55 percent describe shared living as a lifestyle choice. Average private rents at 1,393 pounds a month and average house prices at 272,000 pounds, both cited from ONS data in the release, help explain why older working tenants stay in HMOs.
This follows Landlord Knowledge’s report on the Bristol court order of 58,271 pounds over HMO licence and repair breaches. That case showed how licence and management failures convert directly into court bills; the COHO findings show the quieter cost when management of who lives together falls short and tenancies turn over faster.
Vann Vogstad, chief executive and founder of COHO, said the sector must stop treating rooms as interchangeable units. “Our research exposes a major gap in the way shared living works today. We ask people to share their homes with complete strangers, yet in many cases they are given little or no information about who they are going to live with. Tenants feeling unsafe in their own home, even once, is not something the sector can ignore,” he said.
Vogstad added that compatibility work pays beyond safety. “Tenants are telling us clearly that they want more transparency, more choice and greater compatibility with the people they live with. Shared living should not mean accepting whoever happens to be allocated the room next door,” he said. COHO reports 63.5 percent of residents describe their shared house as a positive presence locally.
The platform published the full State of Shared Living 2026 report and method note on 13 October. COHO, founded in 2019, says its system now covers more than 6,000 HMOs and 55,000 tenants.
What this means for landlords
- If you let HMOs: advertise the current household mix honestly and share basic housemate detail before sign-up – blind lets raise early exits.
- If you fill rooms: give sitting tenants a say on shortlists where practical; 16 percent say that alone would keep them longer.
- Watch for: compatibility checks at viewing stage becoming a letting standard, in the same way referencing did.
- Bottom line: a room filled fast but matched badly often voids again within months, while a matched house can run three times longer.
Editor’s view
Filling a room is not the same as keeping a house. Landlords who treat housemate fit as part of the letting, not an afterthought, will hold tenants longer and face fewer disputes. In a market short of rooms, retention beats recruitment.
Author: Editorial Team – UK landlord & buy-to-let news, policy, and finance
Published: 14 October 2026
Sources: COHO State of Shared Living 2026, National HMO Register, ONS
Related reading: SpareRoom: UK room rents hit record 769 pounds as supply falls
