Visiting houses with estate agents, you get a sense of the place the second the door opens. You breathe it in. This particular house smelled of the woods. It was a hot day but it was cold inside and as the door shut behind us our daughter reached up quickly to be carried. The first odd thing was how the rooms were seemingly interchangeable: a bath, a chair, an empty glass. “There’s nobody actually… living here, is there?” we asked. “Doesn’t look like it!” the agent chuckled. The wires were exposed. Damp climbed the paint. The second odd thing was that all the doors were locked. It was only when one opened that we realised why: every silent room was occupied by a different tenant. People were living here, but barely.

It was when we turned to go up to the first floor (another unplugged oven, a broken window) that I saw the man’s legs. I realised immediately I was waiting for a corpse – the house was dying, it expected a corpse. So it was almost worse when I saw that he wasn’t dead; he was terrified. Fiftyish, crouched, cowering behind the bannisters, he was scared to see strangers in his house, and he was blindly pissed, or high, or ill, and he was shaking. It wasn’t until my partner quietly told him we’d leave that I realised we could.

At the door we bumped into a woman with a dog. She said she was the owner’s sister. Did she know that people were living there, we asked. “Don’t worry about them,” she smoked. “They’re all on two-week contracts.” I asked the estate agent if he was as shocked by what we’d seen as I was. “Yes,” he said. “It shouldn’t have been on for that price.” Shocking. Would we be interested in making an offer?

It was when we turned to go up to the first floor that I saw the man’s legs. I realised I was waiting for a corpse

I was a bit shaky when I got on the train. Later, I was shaky, too, when we talked about what might happen to that cowering man.

We talk so much in tuts and despair about the housing crisis in London, my friends resigned to the knowledge that they’ll never afford a flat, destined to spend half their salaries on rent and be moved on at a landlord’s whim. But while I’d seen the upheaval, the lives diluted into three blue Ikea bags, I hadn’t yet seen this up close. It’s not quite homelessness; it’s not quite not.

In that house the story was laid out like a mindfulness colouring book – it took no work to fill in the gaps: desperate people, a sheet for a curtain, benefits being filtered away monthly. On one side of the door my small enthusiastic family, over-mortgaged and looking for a “doer-upper”, a kitchen to knock through and fill with eBayed glass. On the other, this. People who have been run over by life, taken advantage of. And the sale of this house will make many hundreds of thousands of pounds when it sells to an investor (it’s now under offer with a different estate agent), leaving these tenants in an even worse situation.

Doesn’t it feel right now like our country is Wile E Coyote the moment before he realises he’s walked off a cliff? Quite aside from all the wider horrors, there is the continuing problem with our searches for home. At the gentlest end are the millennials moving back in with their parents. At the sharpest are those bedding down on the streets. I heard today about a man who’s worked with the homeless for years – before his job was to persuade rough sleepers to take a bed in a hostel; now there is nowhere for them to go. And then in between the two is the widening well of “hidden homeless”, on sofas, in squats, and in places like this very haunted house. These tenants will surely soon become homeless, with the council responsible for finding them shelter that doesn’t exist.

I have a certain gnawing guilt about entering the housing market when I see not just the cost of property but the cost of strangers’ lives, the bedroom too tidy because it was only a mattress and sheet, the gruesome inevitability of the people profiting. Surely there is a better way to go home?

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman