I am extremely disappointed to see that you have such a low opinion of us. I can assure you that as business we place a huge amount of importance on customer service, the success of our business ultimately depends on it. We have to meet the expectations of both our tenants and our landlords if we are to continue to grow and develop as a business. We proactively request feedback from both tenants and landlords so that we can address any areas where we are not performing as we should be.

I completely agree that data protection is very important, we take it seriously and any lapses in this respect are not acceptable, even if as a result of a genuine error. We are currently working very hard to ensure that we compliant with The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The property you rented through us was not managed by our agency; the landlord instructed us to provide a Find a Tenant service only. The landlord managed the property themselves throughout your tenancy. The landlord in question has been using our agency to find tenants for their portfolio of properties for approximately 14 years and does not share your poor opinion of us. The keys would have been given to you by the landlord's Inventory Clerk, who will have met you at the property on the day of check in, not by us. The cleaning would also have been arranged by the landlord, not by our agency but I am sorry if the level of cleaning was not satisfactory; I have to say this is unusual for this landlord.

When you say that you ‘never had the same person dealing with your enquiries', I am assuming you mean before your tenancy started, in which case I apologise that this was your perception of the process. We are a large team but we try to provide consistency to our customers and we all have designated roles. Once the let was agreed with Kat, who is one of our Negotiators then you would have dealt primarily with Karen who is the Tenancy Manager. During the tenancy we would have had no contact with you as we did not manage the property.

I can assure you that no one in my office would ‘guess' information about parking and permits. When we re-market properties we provide the team with detailed notes about the property, which would include the parking situation and in fact this information is checked each time a property comes back on the market.

When you gave the landlord notice to vacate, they instructed us to re-market the apartment and find new tenants. As per the tenancy agreement, we are required to give tenants notice of viewings and generally, we phone tenants in occupied properties for viewings the following day, towards the end of the day. This is to minimise the number of calls that we make to tenants and hence the disturbance. We do not hold keys for properties that we do not manage and are reliant on the landlord arranging keys for us, when a property comes back on the market. We would never expect tenants to leave a property unsecured to allow us to access for a viewing. I would however expect my team to sort the keys out and if that did not happen then I am of course very sorry.

The deposit was held in our client account and registered in TDS at the request of the landlord. Whilst this was the case we have no mandate to do anything with the deposit at the end of the tenancy until we are instructed to do so by the landlord. Once we have the written instructions of the landlord and the written agreement of the tenants, if any deductions are being made, then the deposit is returned. Any delay would not be as a result of inaction on our part; we return deposits immediately on receipt of the appropriate authorisation.

Kind Regards
Deborah Hadley
Director