By far the worst estate agents I have ever dealt with in 8 years of living in London.
When we moved in, the property was supposedly professionally cleaned, it wasn't. My flatmate literally cleaned food off the ceiling & blinds in the kitchen because it was that filthy.
Whenever we had an issues with the flat, especially when first moving in, it took such a long time to get things sorted. The communication from the team is absolutely appalling.
We lived in the flat for 6 months at which point both my flatmate and I left London due to lockdown to be with our families. We were emailed over 2 months before our lease was up to ask if we wanted to extend, we replied the next morning stating that we were moving at the end of the lease.
Fast forward about a month and I was in the process of leasing a new flat and asked for a reference. At this point we received a rude email telling us that we hadn't replied to them about ending our lease and they were now being asked for references for my new flat. We replied and let them know that we had in fact replied over a month before, and attached the email. Things only went downhill from here.
For the second 6 months of our lease we were not at the property for about 4 months. During this time the estate agents could have gone and taken pictures etc for when they wanted to put the property back on the market, but they didn't because they had completely ignored our email about not extending our lease. Due to them not reading our email by the time they got round to taking pictures of the flat we had packed up all of our things, which I made them aware of before they went to take pictures. We were asked when the things would be cleared from the flat as though we had left them there past the date of our lease! We were still paying full rent and asked for no reduction during lockdown, it was completely our right to have our things in the flat, packed up or not.
They then posted the pictures online to lease the flat again. At this point I realized they had moved my personal property without my consent which is completely out of order. I had been back before the pictures were posted, but after they were taken, and didn't realize anything had been moved because they had even gone to the lengths of putting things back exactly as they were before including a blanket thrown onto the bed to look like it had never been moved! If they needed to move my things then they should have asked, I gave them permission to move things in the kitchen so why couldn't they ask about the rest of the property? Agents are not allowed to move/touch your personal property without your consent!!
To make matters worse when they showed the property they left a light on for 4 days with curtains wide open!! We then received a call from our neighbour telling us that someone had called the police and ambulance as they were worried that something had happened due to the light being on consistently for 4 days! We received no apology from them and no compensation for wasting this electricity which we then had to pay for!
Lastly it took us more than 6 weeks to actually get our deposit back. They tried to charge us for several different things which we had not done. Luckily we had taken pictures of the flat when we moved in so were able to get the charges reduced. We ended up paying for some holes made in the bathroom which we did not do!! We actually didn't mind paying at the end as we would've paid to be rid of them anyway!!
chiranjiv dhillon, 16 Oct 2020