Via a pleasingly simple interface — no preponderance of drop down menus and radio buttons here, just bash in a postcode, borough, or Tube station and you're away — the website lists the average price per week for any size of private property, from a room in a shared flat up to a four-bedroom pad. Thus, this Londonista has just discovered that the price he pays in rent is a shade over the median for this postcode, a little under the borough average, and considerably more than across Greater London as a whole. Useful to know.
Additionally, there's a colour-coded map showing where the cheapest and most expensive rents are. Not many surprises there — Dartford is the cheapest place, while a thick red band of high-value rents cuts through Kensington — although bargain-hunters might be interested at what seems a particularly inexpensive enclave around Chiswick. For renters unsure about what they need to do, or those who've been stung by lousy landlords in the past, there are pages on tenancy agreements and deposits.
The website isn't without some flaws: large parts of central London aren't included, some of the data is threadbare (the stats are drawn from a pool of just 11,009 properties) and at present it's not uncommon to run into error pages where there simply isn't any information at all. But assuming more stats are fed in regularly, this could turn into an excellent resource for getting the skinny on prices for any particular area, without having to wash it down with a mugful of Foxtons treacle.
