Not Squatting But Renting

I came across a company the other day, Camelot, which offers cheap solutions for people willing to be flexible with their rental accommodation.

In a nutshell, they offer a service to owners of empty buildings by “placing live-in guardians in the building for the period that it is vacant”.

As a “guardian”, for a greatly reduced rent, you get to live in a variety of empty buildings (the current list includes: pubs, schools, community centres) to dissuade squatters and other ne’er do wells.

You get to live for cheap in what mostly seem like nice buildings and yes, you can have an ‘adventurous way of living’ according to Camelot, whatever that means.

But on the flipside you often have to share premises, run the risk of being asked to vacate the premises within a relatively short period and are essentially being treated as a cut-price security guard.

Plus, there are the odd horror stories floating around the forums. One ex-guardian describes how “… we were evicted for refusing to give entry to a very drunk and abusive man in the early hours of a Saturday morning - it turned out he was the owner - we’d never met him and he was trying to break in - we thought we were acting in the property’s interest. If I was in alone it would have been a really scary experience.”

Hmm, so not all as shiny as it seems. Plus, as one of the more militant net users points out: “Why pay them £200 a month when you could just squat in the same properties for free!” Damn right. Power to the people!

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