UNCLE Founder Ryan Prince
Mr Prince said: “We have resident women managers so if a woman is uncomfortable with doing a show around with a man they can ask for a woman. If they have had a bad experience in the past they will never have one with us.”
UNCLE has two apartment blocks in New Cross and Stockwell and is completing a 45-storey tower in Elephant & Castle.
Mr Prince said about half of the company’s 1,000 tenants are women, many in their twenties or early thirties.
Kassy Essiet, resident manager at UNCLE Elephant & Castle, said: “The kind of behaviour highlighted by Shelter’s report is outrageous and is the opposite of how we do things at UNCLE.
Renters in the UK are treated like second-class citizens and this report suggests women receive the worst of it.”
An investigation by The Sun found dozens of sex-for-rent adverts on the Craigslist website.
One landlord offered a reporter posing as a potential tenant a flat in Canary Wharf rent free if she shared a bed with him twice a week.
A BBC investigation found a landlord who had a log cabin in his garden where tenants could sleep in return for a “physical arrangement once a week”.
The practice is potentially in breach of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which carries a maximum sentence of seven years, although there have been no prosecutions to date.