Meet the Tenants. It’s what many landlords are doing, particularly those who choose to subvert the dire sales market and are renting out their homes, rather than selling them for a song. It’s not a particularly normal thing to do if you are using an agent to let and manage your flat, but renting out your house is a different game.

In terms of flats, as long as your tenant seems vaguely reasonable, pays the rent on time and doesn’t appear to have any potentially antisocial habits, ie, keeping snakes or playing Gilbert O’Sullivan at 4am, it doesn’t really matter who moves in. My friend, ITV super-sleuth Jonathan Maitland, is proud of never having met any of his tenants. He operates solely through agents, who do the vetting, credit checks and so on.

However, things are very different if you are renting out what was once your home. When you consider who is going to enjoy what was once your private pad, it all gets a bit more personal. Some agents say 15% of landlords renting out their homes want to meet the tenants before signing on the dotted line.

I’m surprised the figure isn’t higher. By the time you read this, Mr Millard, the three junior Millards and myself will have carted about 770 cardboard boxes across London N1 to our new abode. (That is, if the effort hasn’t encouraged offspring No 4 to make an unforeseen entrance three weeks early.) Have we sold our old house? You bet we haven’t.

After four months on the market and zero offers, we have finally rented it out with the Islington lettings department at Foxtons, headed by the intrepid Ed Phillips, who has installed four tenants in our former home. Have we met them? You bet we have.

“Oh, these guys are all City chaps,” said Phillips brightly by way of introducing the quartet of sharers. If you use the term pretty loosely, I suppose they are. One is employed near the City. One is a DJ at a nightclub in London. One works shifting scenery at the English National Opera and another sells oxygen in nightclubs in Liverpool and Birmingham but is from Clerkenwell, which is close to the City.

A Phillips underling brought three of them to meet me and Mr Millard. The oxygen seller was absent. Perhaps he was plying his wares at some monster rave. “Oxygen?” queried my husband during the meet-and-greet moment. “Is this a big thing in clubs?” Forget Meet the Tenants; this was more akin to the Robert De Niro-Ben Stiller farce Meet the Parents. “I mean, do clubbers need regular doses of oxygen?” persisted Mr Millard. “To give them energy?” Fortunately the three putative tenants didn’t despair of this totally square behaviour, and seemed quite happy to be quizzed about their jobs and how much furniture they would need, following which they all signed on the dotted line.

Forty minutes later a vast red Let sign went up outside the Millard domicile and we were in official Go mode. In a way, it is good to know who is coming in, because we can now leave the house in the most appropriate style possible. The scribbles have been painted away from the nursery wall, the farm animal curtains in the baby’s room have been replaced by a nice denim blue pair from John Lewis and I have left a step-by-step guide to the Aga.

Barry Manners from Chard rental agency in west London suggests that on-the-sofa encounters can be just as tough on the tenants as they are on the landlord. “Tenants might get cold feet if you go too hard on them. These are not people at a university freshers’ week, and frankly they don’t need to be interviewed by a couple from the home counties wearing pullovers asking about their drinking habits.”

Oh, you are cruel. But it’s probably not wise to give too hard an inquisition. Tenants are aware that there are lots of people out there doing a Rosie Millard, and they tend to play hardball on the price. “Rentals are softening,” concurs Manners, “because so many landlords are not selling and renting out, which has given the renters loads of choice.”

Plus, as he sees it, we could be lucky with our foursome. “Blokes tend to be better sharers than girls, because they don’t have dinner parties but stop at Domino’s on the way home from work for a pizza. People get very nervous about having four male sharers but they can be more reliable. And very often sharers make better tenants than families, who bring in crayons and bikes all over the place.”

Has he had any disastrous landlord-tenant encounters? “We did have one lady from Kensington who just thought that no-one was good enough for her lovely home. No-one. Even the vice-president from an investment bank, for goodness sake. And we had another who was renting out her mother’s house after the old lady had died. It was really not in a great state of repair, but she still went bonkers when she discovered the tenants had rolled up the old patterned carpets and stripped the floorboards beneath. She just rang us up and started screaming.

“That attitude is hopeless. You have to dissociate your personal feelings and remember you are renting out bricks and mortar, not your home. My advice is to step back and be objective.”

Great stuff. Pass the oxygen canister.

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