Landlords: Friend or Foe?

Mismatched furniture, mould and the faint smell of musk, it can only be a student house.

Us students are known to live in questionable lodgings to say the least. My search for the ‘perfect’ student accommodation included viewing a house with the downstairs bedroom in the outside porch…chilly, damp and just plain weird.

Unfortunately it seems that once you have found your “home” for the year, the battle has only just begun.

I continuously had problems with my letting agent last year. The boiler broke and nobody came to fix it, so I ended up paying a plumber myself. My room had damp, which the letting agent insisted was my fault because they had ‘never had a damp problem before’. I happened to know the previous residents who confirmed that it was damp when they lived there.

After a year of dissatisfaction, we were happy to be leaving to a new house and new landlord. We scrubbed the house spotless, only our letting agent claimed that the house was left ‘dirty’ and she would be taking money from our deposit. With all of us on our holidays, we weren’t available to contest this and got unfairly charged.

My friends and I aren’t alone in our landlord woes, these two students told The Tab about their negative student housing experience:

‘When it came to getting back the damage deposit, our landlord went quiet. When we pressured him, he said he was having “cash flow problems”. Eventually the cheque arrived but in the interim, I learnt that landlords are legally obliged to not spend that money.’

‘You don’t expect to have to battle mould and grime in your room that you pay a lot for. I worry that it will grow back and make me ill.’

These sources both wished to remain anonymous, which only shows the power that landlords and letting agents have; we want to protest, but we fear that if we formally complain, relations will only be worse between us and the person we pay our rent to.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not labelling all landlords as bad. The Tab’s Ed Claxton has had a good landlord experience: ‘you might expect it to be awkward having your friend as your landlord, but if anything it makes it better because any problem you have with the house is a problem they share.’

For those of us who aren’t so lucky, here are The Tab’s top tips for dealing with landlords and letting agents:

– Check that your deposit is in a secure account

– Take photos of everything. When you move in take photos of what is there. When you move out take photos of your undamaged furniture and your clean house (providing this is the state of it!)

Put complaints in writing, via email so that you have a record of what was said when.

Email [email protected] for any further advice.