Quite simply the worst company i have ever dealt with (and I'm a Scottish Power customer!!!) The staff are completely rude, they NEVER return my phone calls and they don't keep any of their promises. Ever since day one they have caused me all sorts of problems. It all started when my lease on my old property (with another agent) was coming to an end and i had decided to move on due to my unbearable neighbors. It took some time to find a property that ticked all the boxes but in the end i found the property with Fineholm that seemed to tick most of the boxes. After viewing the property i called the office and spoke to Taryn who was about as enthusiastic on the phone as a dying animal, not a great first impression! Never the less i decided (much to my peril) to press on with securing the property, as i was now at the point where i had to find a flat or risk becoming homeless at the end of my current lease. This was a situation which i feel Fineholm and Taryn exploited to their own gain. I was looking for an initial 6 month lease which is how this property was advertised, Taryn advised me that because i wanted to move in to the property in July that the Landlord probably wouldn't agree to a 6 month lease because that would mean my lease would end in January and it is too difficult to find a tenant in January (have you ever heard the like?). I responded by asking Taryn to find out if the Landlord would agree to a six month lease, but i stupidly told him (because of the time pressure I was under) that if they didn't agree to it that i would just take an 8 month lease. I spoke to Taryn the following day to arrange the formalities involved in setting up the lease. Until i brought up the matter Taryn never mentioned anything about the term of the lease. When i asked him if he's spoken to the Landlord about it, he answered hesitantly by saying that the Landlord refused my request. Judging by the manner n which he gave this response i doubt very much that he bothered his a*se contacting the Landlord. I could see on Zoopla that the property had been on the rental market for some time so i doubt very much the Landlord would have risked losing a new tenant over a couple of months on the lease. So in the end i signed up to this 8 month lease, which by the way, had a clause n it that they would raise the rent every 6 months. I was therefor pressured into signing a lease which tied me into a mandatory price increase! Things only got worse from there. I was given an inventory with literally hundreds of points on it (i have rented several properties from other agents and have never seen the like) this is clearly used to trip up tenants in a desperate ploy that they will overlook inaccuracies (deliberate inaccuracies?) Unfortunately neither me nor y partner really have the time to dissect such a mammoth document, so i never fully checked or returned the inventory, as i have never had any issues with ths from any of my previous agents (big mistake btw!). I did have a look through it and everything did look to be in order (I found out after my final inspection that this really was not the case). Upon moving into the property i found that their were no less than five light bulbs out. Admittedly this isn't a massive issue but it did specifically mention in the lease that if any light bulbs were out that we should let our property manger (Melissa) know within 5 days and these would be replaced. As my lease was signed just before the office closed on a Friday night I called the first chance i got on the Monday afternoon to speak to Melissa, I was advised by a colleague of hers that she was on lunch and that she would leave her a message to call back. It got to Wednesday and i still hadn't heard anything, so i decided to call back, again i was told that Melissa wasn't available but that she would call me back. By Friday i still hadn't heard anything so i decided to email Melissa directly myself, that way i could be sure that she would get the message. I explained in my email about how i had called on the Monday and the Wednesday had had received no response, and that i wanted the bulbs replaced. Melissa ignored this email, which i have since found out is a habit of hers. In the end i bit the bullet and replaced the bulbs myself. It's not a massive cost but the crux of the issue is not so much the cost but the way i was treated by the rude and unhelpful staff, and not for the first time, certainly not for the last time. The next issue i had with Fineholm was about general incompetence and broken promises. I came back from a lovely holiday in Crete to find my kitchen flooded by the "*" in the flat above (not Fineholm's fault of course) My partner contacted Melissa the very next day to advise what had happened. Melissa advised my partner that they would send someone out to assess the damage and to arrange any remedial work. The water luckily hadn't done any serious damage the place just needed a major scrub down and the ceiling needed repainted to cover the brown marks, Fineholm wouldn't have known this though, as they never bothered sending anyone out. I decided just to drop the issue as Fineholm were becoming a real chore to deal with and quite frankly it was ore hassle than it was worth to get the, to do anything. I wasn't overly bothered my the mark on the ceiling. A month or two later i got out of bed one morning to find water literally pouring from the ceiling, the aforementioned alcoholic had done it again but this tie i was there to witness the water pouring through the ceiling. Obviously this is quite concerning, as the weight of the water was causing the ceiling to sg and it looked as though it could collapse at anytime (again not Fineholm's fault). The first thing i did was chap the door of the flat above, but there was no answer. Knowing that the Fineholm office would not yet be open I turned to my Fineholm welcome pack for advise. The pack did indeed have advice for my very situation, it provided a contact number for environmental health and advised that if we contacted them they would arrange for the Police to break in and shut off the water. Unfortunately the number provided and it's department had closed down many years ago (how helpful!) nor could i find any such alternative online. I then decided to try cutting out the middle man and phone the police directly (on a non emergency number) only to be advised that this was not a police matter and that the information in the Fineholm welcome pack was inaccurate. After all this rigmarole enough time had passed that the Fineholm office was now open. Melissa was as helpful as ever by having no suggestions other than try chapping the door again (we knew the loon ball in the flat above had not returned home, as we would have heard him). Eventually our neighbor did come back home and we got him to sort what ever the hell it was that as causing the flooding. We were again advised by Mellisa that someone would be round to assess and repair the damage, this as we had come to expect, was another lie. The only people that came round were a couple of guys with a dehumidifier whom the Landlady herself had arranged, not Fineholm. Personally i don't blame her from taking matters into her own hands (on her "fully managed" property) as Fineholm sure as sh*t weren't going to do anything about it. Another problem i had is that they insist on arranging inspections and then don't turn up. I understand that you don't have to be in for these inspections but personally i wouldn't let a stranger in my house on their unattended (god knows what they could be getting up to), So my partner arranged to be in the house during the 3 hour time gap that they gave. For the first inspection they didn't turn up. We then got an email saying that they couldn't make it because of traffic (apparently the traffic was so bad that they couldn't make the 10 minute drive that their office is from the flat, in 3 hours!) So they then gave us another 3 hour slot in which my partner waited in for and again nobody showed up. The full 8 months i lived there there wasn't a single inspection, the same thing happened with the other two or three inspections they arranged during this time. They did somehow manage to show up for the final inspection that's for sure!!! Now the final inspection really was the icing on cake. They sent possibly the rudest person i have ever met, sadly i can't recall her name. The way this woman spoke to me and my partner was unbelievable, she made personal comments about how we never cleaned the flat properly (the house was "*" spotless!!!), she even made a comment about how there were finger marks on the (chrome) taps, it doesn't matter how well you clean those taps the second you touch them they get finger prints on them. it's common sense. So at the end of her hour long inspection (of a 1 bed flat) she had a list as long as her ar of things that were apparently wrong wth the flat. I have rented several flats in the past and i have left them all at the same standard and never lost a single penny from my deposit. As expected we received correspondence some weeks later advising us that they were looking for £150 from our deposit. This was split into £60 for cleaning, £60 for repairs and replacements and £30 for an arrangement of work fee. As mentioned earlier, the flat was spotless and no cleaning was required at all, none the less i expected them to try and gouge money out of us for this anyway. Now the law in regards to Landlords keeping deposits specifically states that the Landlord/agent cannot be in a better posoition than they were before the lease was signed so by the letter of the law this £30 fee for "arrangement of work" is illegal, how can they possibly justify it costing that amount to make a few phone calls? Their justification is that it is in the lease that i signed, guess what Fineholm that doesn't make it legal!!! In regards to the fee for repairs and replacements, i would expect and agree to pay something towards this as i did accidentally damage a cheap naff wooden door in the property. They have a very similar door in B&Q for £22 (which isn't the cheapest shop in the word), even factoring in costs for a handle and the tie for someone to buy and fit it i wouldn't expect to pay any more than £50 and that's being generous. So all in all they are trying to rip me off every which way they can. When they sent the email i replied back the same day with a pretty lengthy message about how ridiculous these costs were and asking for a full breakdown of what exactly they were for (i.e what was cleaned, repaired etc) and advising that i would absolutely be disputing these charges. I got a rather rude email back from Lee Anne Reid, advising me that i can dispute it if i want but they "will win", and advising that she has passed y message on to Melissa and she will contact me to discuss my points. No prizes for guessing what happened next! Yep, no reply from Melissa (saw that one coming a mile off!). I am still none the wiser as to the breakdown of these charges but Fineholm will be forced to hand that information over during the dispute. I'm not all that bothered about the money tbh, it's more to do with the principal of the matter. I read a similiar complaint on here about Fineholm, and their (not so) clever answer was that only 1% of people dispute their deposit return. If anything that only backs up the point that they try anything they can to steal their tenant's deposits because 99% of people won't bother disputing it! Silly Fineholm. I would like to finish off by mentioning that this is just a handful of the issues i endured during the short time i was with Fineholm, i really could have gone on all day but i got a little board. So if you want an agent with rude, unhelpful, "*" staff then Finholm is the company for you!