Letting Agency Stupidity
Before my wife and I bought our first home we, like many others, rented a nice little two bedroomed house close to the town centre but on a nice quiet street. Our landlady was very young and inexperienced and it transpired that she had been given the house as a gift from an elderly relative and have decided to rent it out. It became quite clear, quite quickly that she had no idea what she was doing. When we phoned her to tell her that there was a water leak and water was coming through her kitchen ceiling, we thought we were doing the right thing. She thought we were difficult tenants. Eventually she realised she couldn't cope and hired the services of a letting agency. Which leads me on to the corporate stupidity part.

You see our landlady had forgotten to tell us that she had hired a letting agency. Normally you would expect an official looking letter informing you that they were taking over the property and how and where to pay the rent in future. We received a hand written note pushed through the door saying "I am AngryScottishGuy from your new letting agency" with his phone number and bank details to pay the rent. At first we thought it was just some scam as the note was written on a scrap of torn paper and written like a spider had crawled over the page. This was until two days later when my heavily pregnant wife opened the door to an angry, red faced Scottish man, who told her he had come to do an inspection. My wife stood her ground and told him she had no idea who he was and he had not given notice. He threatened to have us evicted, we slammed the door in his face. We then caught him in the back garden and he had climbed over the back gate. I went out and politely asked him what the fuck he thought he was doing. "Inspecting the garden" was his reply. I threatened to call the police and he left. We wrote to our landlady informing her of all this and heard nothing back. When rent day came we paid our rent as normal directly in to our landlady's account. a week later we had a visit from an even angrier, even more red faced but also Scottish, man demanding to know why we hadn't paid our rent. We told him we had paid our rent to our landlady and would continue to do so until she told us otherwise. Cue more threats of eviction and another hand scrawled note through the letter box saying he would be back in 24 hours to do the inspection. He returned the next day and we again refused to let him in saying we had A. No idea who he was and B. 24 hours notice was for emergency access. More threats of eviction made worse by the fact I laughed at him. He told me to contact my landlady and ask her if his agency was managing the property and I told him that it wasn't up to me to do anything and that we would continue to pay our rent on time in the way specified in our contract until our landlady tells us otherwise. He could not understand why we would not just take his word and a hand written note from himself as proof. We were in fact contacting our landlady after every occasion to inform her that a group of Scottish men with anger management issues and a faces of rouge, kept coming over and demanding money and access to the property. As we were not getting any replies it just reinforced our belief that he was trying it on.

It turns out that they had told our landlady to forward all correspondence from us directly to them to deal with and despite my wife at times writing letters pointing out that she was a heavily pregnant woman alone in the house, being bullied by men who would appear in the garden on more than one occasion trying to get in to the house, she would still just forward the letters to them. Eventually after three months and rent payments directly in to our landlady's account and the guy coming over several times a week our landlady finally got in touch. She came over and confirmed that they were in fact from the letting agency and to pay our rent to them. We informed her that they were bullies, who did not care about the law and were using threats of eviction to try and get their way. We handed our notice in and left after the next rent cycle.

It never did occur to either of them why we were "being difficult"

tl:dr - Letting agencies are run by cunts.
( Peej, Thu 23 Feb 2012, 13:15, 6 replies)

Damn right
The company I'm with at the moment are sneaky little bastards that (on two occasions) haven't informed me that I've been behind in paying rent and have gone straight to "We've applied for a court date to get you evicted see you there." without the courtesy of even a crudely-writtten note, phone call, or angry Scottish person prior to this. Just a few more months and I'll be able to afford the deposit for a mortgage somewhere, haven't decided where yet but I don't care. Letting agents are cunt of the highest order. I'd even go so far a to say that they deserve the same piut of Hell as anyone who work in 'Human Resources'.

Thi has led to me
( Funkenschlag still likes dogs more than cats, Thu 23 Feb 2012, 13:29, closed)

Blimey.
Click, but... incredible.
(McChinaman banned, Thu 23 Feb 2012, 13:34, closed)

What a shower of shites!
Your landlady was a fucking idiot, though.

The one time I rented somewhere, the landlord died, and no one bothered to let me know. His daughter-in-law eventually let me know, after I enquired about her husband, who had been in a foul mood for a few weeks.
( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Thu 23 Feb 2012, 13:51, closed)

Plain idiocy.
It's almost nice when they're that incompetent. Quite satisfying to be able to confidently tell them to piss off.

Only time I ever rented, if you call it that, was when I had a room in my brothers flat. Have heard a lot of horror stories about dodgy landlords. Most of them here.
(username failed moderation, Thu 23 Feb 2012, 14:00, closed)

THEY ARE ALL CUNTS.
Cunting fucking cunts.
(may be in a dispute with a cunting letting agent at the moment)
( Herb Alpert's Taxi Driver I have very beautiful lips, Thu 23 Feb 2012, 19:05, closed)

Not all of them
Just the majority (the last lot I rented from weren't perfect but were alright)
( thistle, Thu 23 Feb 2012, 22:27, closed)