For the past few weeks, the Soton Tab have been running a survey to find out you think about your landlords. We’ve looked over and sorted all the results into a list of the top-to-bottom rated landlords.

There were tons of landlords we’d never heard of who only got one vote, who we haven’t listed here.

We’ll look at agencies and landlords in two separate lists:

Landlords:

1. UniPads (Bob Church)

Average rating: 9.3

Average rent: £67.83 / wk

“Awesome”

“Very very good landlord! Easily contactable and always fixes problems the next working day.”

Website: http://uni-pads.co.uk/

2. iStudentlets

Average rating: 8.5

Average rent: £74.50 / wk

Website: http://istudentlets.com/Overview.pdf

3. Kal Kang

Average rating: 7.0

Average rent: £64.50 / wk

“He responds quickly and has not hassled us about renewing our tenancy agreement.”

4. Posh Pads

Average rating: 6.29

Average rent: £78.79

“Not a bad agency to deal with”

“Oh so over priced”

“They’ve taken on too many new houses and don’t have enough staff.”

Website: http://www.poshpads.com/

Comments from us: It is worth noting that Posh Pads are the highest rated ‘large’ student landlord.

5. StudNoFee

Average rating: 3.7

Average rent: £67.12

“Rat’s. But good maintenance. Rat problem now fixed! I would rent from them again.”

“The service is good, but they should call it “STUDENT we dont charge fees but insted we just take you deposit money NO FEE”

Website: http://www.studnofee.com/

Update: We have spoken to StudNoFee and the average deposit held for damages & cleaning is only £43.08 per student.

6. Homelife Lettings

Average rating: 2.75

Average rent: £78.25

“They go very much to the contract, which is I suppose is better than many landlords out there.”

“They never respond to emails ….. wish I’d never used the company.”

“Friendly enough and cool when we need to pay rent late but they don’t seem to care that much about the state of their properties, several of our long term complaints just were never sorted.”

“Our ceiling caved in and it took 5 days for them to come and see it.”

Website: http://www.homelifelettings.co.uk/

7. AAJ’s Accomodation

Average rating: 2.6

Average rent: £74.50

“House wasn’t ready until mid September, meant to be ready June 1st.”

Website: http://www.aajsaccommodation.co.uk/1431/frames.php

Agencies:

We decided to rate the agencies in a totally separate category. For those of you who don’t know – agencies (generally) show people around properties, and then normally take a finders fee for helping you find a house. We had a lot of students confused about what the fee was for.

As with landlords, we chose not to rank any agencies which had only one vote.

1. C2 Lettings

Average rating: 5.3

“C2 were the worst ever, with scares of them going bankrupt.”

Comments from us: C2 lettings went bust in the Summer term of 2010, so you can no longer rent through them.

2. Tenant Direct

Average rating: 3.0

“Tenant Direct agency are completely useless …. [they] lied in our face and then forgot to mention they changed the payment procedure for international students in our house.”

“They were really unfriendly, didn’t give us any advice or support at all.”

“We ended up getting charged an extra month’s rent because they couldn’t be bothered to set up the standing order properly.”

Website: http://www.tenantdirect.co.uk/

Comments from us: This author (Chris Houghton) ended up having the same issue with the extra month’s rent charge due to an incorrectly set-up standing order. The extra payment was returned to us soon after by our landlord (Homelife Lettings) with no deduction.

3. South Lettings

Average rating: 3.0

“With these guys it seems like you may as well just throw £140 down the drain …. they couldnt orgonise a pencil case let alone getting someone in to fix your toilet”

Website: http://www.southresidential.co.uk/

Anything else:

The landlords and agencies listed above are the best known landlords who received more than one vote in our survey. However, there were countless other smaller, private landlords, who generally fared very well.

General advice:

We also had a few comments on the survey from students leaving advice on picking a landlord. Below is a selection:

“Go to private landlords – no agency fee, you can haggle it down …. walk about student areas looking for posters”

“Go on www.sassh.co.uk, password sassh”

SUSU is also running a Housing Week this week, and you can find out more details a: http://www.susu.org/life/. This is probably the best advice you’ll get on housing in Southampton.

Stay tuned for more housing stories and opinions on the Soton Tab.