The response from the agent here is disgraceful and if I were the subject of the reply would consider legal action for data protection violations.

Mark, you are (supposedly) a professional yet this is the least professional response I have ever seen and I work as a compliance officer for a national company overseeing the complaints we handle.

If I found out anybody had responded in a way like this either through work channels or in a public forum disciplinary procedures would be carried out for gross misconduct with the very likely outcome being dismissal.

I hope many of your potential customers see your attitude and use another agent as you are an abhorrent person.

What a terrible response from Mark Anderson, I would definitely never use Martin and Co now.

Thanks for your honesty which obviously brought out the nasty, pedantic and true side of that man.

Hello Stephanie,

It is you isn't it? We have never had a tenant called A. Brians and I recognise the circumstances that you describe. So it must be you.

It must be 4 years since we last spoke and since you were in the flat. It was that very cold winter when many condensate pipes from boilers froze up rendering lots and lots of boilers inoperative in many properties. There was a period of a couple of weeks where it was very difficult to get same day service from heating engineers due to the huge amount of unexpected boilers with frozen condensate drain pipes.

This period was the first really cold spell after a set of regulations were introduced and many installers didn't really appreciate how to install these drain tubes so that they wouldn't freeze hence all the problems.

When you called our office to report the issue, we didn't tell that there was nothing we could do. We told you that we couldn't get an engineer to you that day but that as we understood that the flat was cold and therefore we would deliver some electric heaters to you which we did on the same day. I would make the point that just because you were paying more rent than perhaps someone in a more modest property, it did not mean that you jumped to the head of the queue as there were some very urgent cases where young children were being affected in a similar manner. It is true that you made several telephone calls to us Stephanie but these were mainly attempts to bully us into paying your hotel bill and jump the queue for heating engineers.

As your flat was 2nd floor, access to the pipe in question was very difficult and it did take a couple of days to get this problem sorted for which we are sorry. However I don't believe anyone could have done this any faster and we did give you some electric heaters to heat the flat with so that you wouldn't be cold.

It was of course your choice to go to a hotel instead of taking advantage of the free heaters that we provided although as you requested, we did ask your Landlord if she would contribute to your hotel bill but sadly she refused because well, there was no obligation for her to do so because we had supplied an alternative means to temporarily heat the flat and because there was no obligation for her to do so under the tenancy agreement or indeed under any laws in this Country. It was certainly not our decision to not pay for your hotel, but your Landlord who we take our instructions from.

Similarly it was your Landlord who asked us to ask for a rent increase. You had signed up as a sole tenant in this property and yet it was clear that you had at least one and perhaps more other occupants living there without permission. We noticed a newspaper report which showed illegal activity had taken place allegedly at your address. Naturally your Landlord was most keen to establish if this was true which is why we were instructed to investigate this. I am pleased to say that we found no evidence to back up the newspaper report however surely you must understand that it was not possible to ignore this?

We certainly received a number of complaints about noise coming from your flat from below and next door. Maybe these were unfounded but it is not possible for us to ignore these matters when brought to our attention.

I would like to make it clear that all of our checkouts are done by an independent inventory clerk. This means that we don't make any decisions about whether a property has been cleaned properly at the end of a tenancy. This is all done by a completely independent person who is qualified to do so.

This means that our tenants are protected from spurious claims on their deposits by rogue Landlords and that we can give deposits back where ever and when ever it is possible to do so. Unfortunately if a tenant does not leave a property in the condition as it was when they moved in then it is inevitable that they will not be happy because money will have to be deducted from their deposit in order to bring it up to the standard that existed at the start of the tenancy.

Any tenant who believes that money is unfairly being taken can dispute this with the Deposit Scheme in use. If an Agent cannot prove that the deductions are justifiable then the tenant gets the money. You agreed with the deductions at the time Stephanie.

Finally we get to this web site.

This web site which is loved by complainers like you Stephanie, was set up as a forum for reviews good and bad. I am pleased that due to the many good reviews Martin & Co in Harrogate have four out of five stars and have not been placed in the bottom 10% of agents as you suggest, but in fact we have been the top placed letting agent in Harrogate for the past 2 years running.

If I recall correctly Stephanie, you are a Commercial Pilot where accuracy and arithmetical ability amongst other things are paramount for the safety of your passengers. You need for instance to be able to understand which way is up and which way is down.

17 out of 221 in the Martin & Co Table means 17 from the top

4 out of 30 in Harrogate means 4 from the top

2,730 out of 21,821 means 2,730 from the top - this is a national figure

the figures which are not Martin & Co group specific also include sales Estate Agents whereas our reviews are for lettings which as I mentioned puts us at number 1 (which is at the top) in Harrogate.

I have complained to Allagents about this review because I consider that it is abusive and personal in several areas. I don't expect Allagents to do much about this as I don't have a lot of faith in their sense of fairness, which is why I won't pay money to them to join their 'transparent agent scheme'. We are already members of ARLA, The Property Ombudsman Scheme, Safe Agent and we have client money protection, all of which afford our clients a high degree of security and confidence.

Mark Anderson Director