Problem with letting agency

[yattering]

Hi, I am hoping for some advice over a problem we had with a letting agency.

 

We no longer rent this property as we were served notice to quit as the owner was selling it but we are still having problems with the agents.

 

We first rented the property in august last year, after a week in it the burglar alarm began to go off continuously, i rang the letting agent to try and sort it out and they told us that they did not know the code so there was nothing they could do, we arranged for someone to come and disconnect the alarm at our cost, we paid for the disconnection, were advised that the whole system had been installed incorrectly and where given an estimate for the cost of repair, we forwarded both the invoice and the estimate on to the letting agency but in the twelve months we had the property it was never fixed. We claimed back the cost of the disconnection via a reduced rent payment the following month as agreed with the letting agency manager. ( will come back to this later)

 

In november of last year the upstairs bathroom developed a leak. We notified the agency who initially ignored our requests. Only when the ceiling of the downstairs rear lounge had actually started to bulge did they send someone, and only after my wife had gone into the estate agents to tell them the ceiling was in danger of collapse did they actually send someone to do the repairs, they fixed the leak, but not the ceiling. Within a couple of weeks the leak started again so we informed them again to be told to contact the builder ourselves. I disconnected the water supply to the bathroom myself at this point then tried to contact the builder who did not respond to my messages.

 

We again informed the estate agents who told us that the builder who carried out the initial repair had to be the one who came to fix it. He eventually conttacted me in early January to say that he had been in hospital but arranged a date to come a few days later to take a look at it and also a window in one of the childrens bedrooms which was side opening with a broken lock, in our view, dangerous. Also reported to the estate agents

 

He never turned up so we again contacted the estate agents who said they would appoint someone else.

 

After numerous phone calls and emails to them they eventually arranged for another builder to come, We had no contact details for him other than an email address which he never responded to so we failed to make any progress, even though we made the estate agents aware of the situation. At this point the estate agents stopped responding to our calls and messages. When we went into there offices the management team would send somebody out to us to tell us they were not available and they would get back to us which they never did.

 

In june of this year we received a letter to vacate the property due to the owner wishing to sell it. We referred the estate agents back to our numerous messages about the state of the property and the fact that we had a bathroom and a bedroom that had been unusable for the majority of the tenancy but the estate agents have fobbed us off with excuse after excuse and basically stalled us until the tenancy was up.

 

We issued a formal complaint to the estate agents two weeks before we were due to move out and were told that it was under investigation and we were to wait and hear back from them

 

My wifes father was the guarantor for the tenancy and last week he received a 'final demand for a payment of £820, this was for the last months rent of £750 plus £70 for 'unauthorised deduction of rent'- this was the £70 mentioned earlier that was an agreed deduction for the cost of the alarm disconnection, which they had accepted and taken the invoice off us for. They told my wifes father that they had been trying to contact us on numerous occasions which is why they had issued the final demand. We had received no letters, phone calls or emails from them, we live in a small village and my wife actually owns and runs a shop directly opposite to the estate agents so as you can imagine, he wasn't to impressed about the fact that his credit rating could have been affected and we were neither about the fact that they had not only lied to him but pressured him into paying it.

 

I decided to email them and ask about the situation with our deposit as it has now been 6 weeks since we vacated the property. I also asked for details about the Deposit protection scheme the deposit is with as i had previously requested this information only to be ignored. We have had no certificate issued to us to this date.

 

We basically had a property were 20% was unusable (Toilet and Bedroom) which we were still charged full rent for, nothing ever got repaired, and we are still awaiting the return of our deposit. They have completely ignored every request we have sent them and we are not sure which way to go with this. I have looked into whether they are registered with any schemes where i could make a further complaint but they do not seem to be, and we also looked on the DPS websites and rang up to see if our deposit was protected with any of them, they all said that they could find no record.

 

any advice would be greatly appreciated and apologies if this doesn't read very well!!

[raydetinu]

You need to contact and write to the LL, copy to agent and ask for your deposit and costs and compensation for things that went wrong, put a an amount you are seeking and why and give them 7 days to respond or you will take them court.

If deposit not protected ( LL responsibility ); that is illegal so should be straight forward in court to get that back.