"The fees you were charged are comparable to other ARLA registered agencies in South Manchester"

Indeed. Which means you all get together and set the market rate. It's a cartel basically.

I will take your review on a point by point basis.

1) As I do not work in the lettings department, I'm unable to comment on your viewing of the property. I have spoken to the relevant manager who has informed me the viewing rep you met left the team a number of months ago, so I'm sorry but I cannot speak to them about this.
However, the paperwork you receive i.e. the application form shows the information the regarding the salary to rent ratio, therefore you were informed in writing of the correct information.

2) We have 1000s of tenants every year, I would like to make it clear that this is a very rare case. It is unfortunate that the property was not up to standard at the time that you moved it. We do not take responsibility for forwarding mail, as it clearly states in the contract, it is up to the tenants, so we leave the mail in the property in case they make direct contact with you to come back and collect it.

3) If you were advised that we were unable to obtain water meter readings for you, you could have contacted the management company for the block and their contact details are clearly displayed in the building, I have seen them when I have visited in the past. You should have been able to contact them to obtain water meter readings when needed.

4) I would state that your claim that we did not attend to any repair works is unfounded. A maintenance contractor attended for the extractor units and there is no record of you calling again to say that they still didn’t work. If that was the case, you were obliged in your tenancy to inform us of maintenance issues, so you should have contacted us to let us know and we could have recalled the contractor. Due to the nature of your work I know you understand the importance of things like this. The extractor fans repairs were charged and paid for, so we would have happily recalled the contractor had we known. The fascia of the oven is another matter; as the oven was operational, we were tied by your landlord’s decision not to pay for a replacement at that point. Unfortunately we are not permitted to carry out work without Landlord’s permission unless it is an emergency and this situation did not qualify as such.

5) Regarding your deposit, you do not have to remind us that deductions cannot be made without communication, we are ARLA registered and handle in excess of 1200 deposits every year. We send the letter to inform you of any deductions being proposed, we are duty bound to do this within 10 days of you vacating the property. As we do not receive the invoices instantly we are unable to provide breakdowns straight away. So, we sent the letter (16.01.14), which notifies you of the works to be carried out (if any – we have plenty of tenancies that finish without any work being required at all) and when you called to say you had not received anything on 24.01.14, our system shows we emailed you a copy of your deposit letter on the same day that you requested it, this was accompanied by an invoice that we had received by the point that you requested the letter. I apologise if you found any of our staff members to be less than polite; that is not acceptable.
I have reviewed the email conversation between you and the member of staff who deals with the few deposit disputes we have, he agreed with some of the points you had made regarding some issues that were picked up by the property inspector after you vacated. As this person had not been to the property previously, they made impartial observations, which you were entitled to dispute and the email we sent back to you agreed with this point. He came to this decision based on the full photographic inspection that we carried out after you had vacated.

6) Every agency charges tenant administration fees, we have to carry out credit checks, references etc. and the fees you were charged are comparable to other ARLA registered agencies in South Manchester.

7) You viewed the property prior to moving in. If you thought it was “extremely tired” you maybe should have considered another property. New carpets were fitted before you moved in as well as some other maintenance work being carried out.

8) In response to your point, “there doesn't seem to be any evidence of them actually using the money they keep back from people's deposits to repair, update or even clean flats prior to re-letting” we have a full record of maintenance we have had carried out on each of our properties accompanied by full invoices, therefore that seems to be an unnecessary comment.