AIBU to think £600 admin fees to rent a flat is daylight robbery?

[Birdy28]

DP and I are having to move as current landlord is selling up after we have only been in the property for 6 months so money is tight.

Saw a flat on Saturday . Property is in this area for rent is very scarce and we only have 2 months to find somewhere.

The credit checks and admin fees are £600 inc deposit to move in (nearly £2500 altogether). Last time we paid this it was £200 for admin fees plus deposit with another agent. AIBU to think they are taking the mickey to charge £600 plus deposit?

I is this really the going rate with high street estate agents?

Here is a link to the petition that Generation Rent are asking everyone to sign to get Vince Cable to ban Letting Agents Fees for tenants in the Consumer Rights Bill which is going through Parliament very soon;

www.generationrent.org/one_more_chance_to_ban_letting_fees

That really is scandalous OP. Totally unjustifiable.

I only ever rented in Scotland too, so had no experience of this.

Guess what has happened to rents?

probably they have gone up a bit, but the landlord can shop around and will once the money is coming out of his pocket. Therefore, agents need to keep their fees low or landlords won't come to them.

If you do it the other way, then landlords probably won't factor (they may not even know) what fee the agent is charging. And of course prospective tenants can't shop around.

it sounds like a good law the Scots have. The landlord will of course pass the cost on to tenants (very reasonable), but then there is an incentive not to have outrageous fees.

I only ever rented in Scotland too, so had no experience of this.

in parts of the US the fee can be up to one month's rent (yes, you read that correctly). sometimes the landlord pays the whole thing, sometimes the tenant pays the whole thing and sometimes you split it. it's simply an extra cost of moving. They also have terrible protections for tenants, so this extra fee can really add up. Typically, however, a first lease is a year long.

It's scandalous. We were all set to go for a house we saw until we found out the admin fees would be in excess of £500. We turned it down on principle. So glad we did, because we ended up finding somewhere far nicer with fees of £250 (still expensive but not quite such a pisstake)

It only costs a letting agency pennies to run a credit check too as they buy the searches in bulk

That is insane! I would be very interested to see an itemised breakdown of that fee.

I can't remember what we paid last time we moved into a London rental (2011) but I think it was around £200.

I'm a LL and where I am the LL fees are one months rent + vat just to find a new tenant. The tenant then pays fees on top.

I had a house available to rent recently, it was on with an agent for about six weeks, the agent was shit, beyond useless. They failed to find a tenant due to their own incompetence. I got fed up and advertised the house myself on Gum Tree, found a tenant within a week, did all the checks very cheaply myself and a video inventory with the tenant, and the tenant moved in.

It was much easier than dealing with the agent, didn't take much time, cost me hardly anything and with no fees at all to the tenant. I would defiantly recommend LL do it themselves, agents are taking the piss out of both of us.

This is interesting reading, especially as the 'worst culprit' is charging what you've been quoted, OP.

"Those that do charge them, on top of the standard deposit and one month’s rent in advance, say they do so for drafting tenancy agreements and conducting reference and credit checks.

Typically, the time spent doing this work is 90 minutes, Rentify said, which means letting agents are charging tenants £146 an hour to complete such checks.

The survey also found that the average fee for a credit reference agency check was £50, a task that costs letting agents less than 20 pence if bought wholesale – something which is standard practice for larger agents."

Whilst I'm still terribly pissed off at the letting agent I'm pleased to see that I'm not the only one who thinks this is a scandal!

Sorry, I wasn't very clear in my post. They want £120 for references and £400 plus vat for admin fees (£600). On top of this there is a deposit which will be 6 weeks rent (approx 1900). Then a holding fee of £500 which will get refunded.

I have just spoken to the estate agent again now. We put in a lower offer for the rent and made it clear that this was to try and offset some of the initial costs.

He is still waiting to hear from the landlord re our offer.

However he did want to take card details from us for the £500 holding fee. I told him that we didn't want to do this until we had agreed rent etc as our main concern was the fees. He assured me that they wouldn't take any money until we had confirmed but I can't understand why they need details now particularly as we have had nothing in writing from them about any of the fees etc.

I'm just beyond frustrated now. I don't want to give them £700 but if we let this go then we may not find anything else in the area .

They have us over a barrel and they know it

Around here it ranges from £500-600 for a couple for referencing and admin fees. Deposits are 6 weeks' rent. Approx. £120-150 for annual contract renewal. On top of that it's normal to pay somewhere in the region of £100-120 on 'checkout' it's a home not a hotel for an independent inventory. You are also expected to pay for professional cleaning on leaving.

This is in one of the cheaper areas where housing stock is often in poor condition - problems like mould, mice, rotting timber window frames, all electric/a lot of Economy 7, single glazing, plumbing problems, plus a lot of decorative damage beyond usual wear and tear. They don't fix the problems due to high demand. One agent said we wouldn't even be permitted to fix things ourselves, like filling holes and painting over.

We're fortunate enough to have had time on our side, for once, in leaving our last property, and found a nice place with really nice LLs who manage the property themselves. A third party managed the legal side, fees for a couple were £180 all in, deposit was a normal one month, and that was it. So hard to find that these days though

I forgot to say YADNBU

It is appalling and we need the same legislation that Scotland has.

For my £600 administration fee I didn't see a contract until the day before I moved in. I was panicking, the estate agent made out that I was being ridiculous for worrying ('you have my word, surely that's enough').

Hastings International in London by the way. A terrible terrible company.

Wheressquirell that link is very interesting.

The amount of money being charged is ludicrous. It's money that we could be saving for a deposit to get us out of renting and onto the property ladder.

If we take this place then we will have spent £850 in letting agent fees alone in six months and that's not including the cost of hiring vans, finding money for deposits etc.

The worst thing is that we don't even want to move but have to as landlord is selling

'you have my word, surely that's enough'

I don't why people don't understand it's not personal. People get screwed left right and centre by dodgy landlords and tenants. You don't know the person, so his word means nothing.

I found a flat with these fees. It's been vacant since June. Wonder why?

We feel that an inclusive service generally means that applicants/tenants that do not have additional requests end up subsidising those that do. Fees are never a pleasure and like tax, no one is ever happy about paying them, but we hope that we are upfront about them and we have explained the rational behind the way we charge.
Main Tenancy Charges - The following charges WILL apply during your tenancy.
Reservation/Administration £275.00 Covers Tenancy credit check and references. £137.50 for each additional Tenant (Min £275.00)
End of Tenancy £150.00 Administration at the end of tenancy. See below for more details.
Renewal for fixed term £95.00 Administration to draw new agreements at the end of the fixed period.
Supplementary Charges - The following charges MAY apply during your tenancy.
Guarantor £150.00 If financial support needed due to credit check or employment status.
Returning an overpayment £15.00 To cover searching for and then returning funds paid in error.
Adding & Removal of Tenant £175.00 Adding or Removal a tenant from an existing tenancy. Terms will apply.
Late payments £50.00 For the administration in tracing payments and managing late payments.

Any items we agree to that fall out side these charges we charge at a rate of £50.00 per hour minimum charge 1 hour.

I have had a look on the shelter website but by the sounds of it the letting companies are free to charge what they want.

Has anyone ever successfully negotiated on fees before? I'm just wondering if I'm wasting my breath trying to get them lower with the estate agents?

What would shock you is that the same agency probably charge your landlord fees so get paid for doing the same work twice. I agree that there needs to be better regulation of estate agents.

Hmmm I wonder if the landlord knows how much they are charging the tenants?

I can't help but think that letting agents are just an expensive middle man for both landlord and tenants.

Agents are generally a pretty lazy bunch as well. Having a lettting agent manage maintaince is a non starter as they never passed on the messages to the landlord/ landlady. I found it works much better to give my email and telephone number to the tenant and just have the agency do rent collection.

I managed to get my current letting agent to drop their £30 fee for providing a reference to my current letting agent. They seemed petty sheepish about charging and have in very quickly

In terms of the LL knowing, they don't always. I have read a few stories on some LL websites (when I've been Googling for rental info!) where they didn't realise what the agents were charging for until the tenants eventually contacted them directly, unhappy about the relationship with the agent, and were shocked to discover that the agents were collecting large fees on both sides.

I know a few LLs and they do like my LL does - manage directly, but pay a third party just for marketing and the initial legal bit to make sure they don't mess that up. But these are smaller LLs, no more than a couple of properties, most have a main career and have invested in property for their retirement.

One of my previous LLs had a large portfolio but they managed everything themselves. When we moved we asked them what was going on with the crazy hikes in fees as things had changed dramatically in just one year. They said how a lot of LLs were being squeezed for more and more, and that in our area in particular there had been a bit of a standoff and so a lot of LLs had essentially drawn a line under what they would pay (still a large sum). As a result a lot of agents had massively upped the fees to tenants as well as introducing new charges, like the cleaning and inventory fees which weren't standard here before.

I can't help but think that letting agents are just an expensive middle man for both landlord and tenants.

my guess is that the fees the tenants pay are much higher than the fees the landlord pays, in the sense that the landlord will probably at least get service for the fees.

the problem with this system is that you have one party hiring another party for services (landlord and letting agent), but a THIRD (that's you tenants!) is paying (part) of the fees. when this happens the chooser (LL) is far less price sensitive since he isn't paying all the fees.

I think the Scots workaround is good. at least then the landlord knows all of the fees and initially sucks them up. even if he passes them on to the tenant in terms of higher rent, he will still want to minimize his cost, since it's not guaranteed he will recoup all of the money spent.

I am not a renter now, but was. renting here is certainly unpleasant. I last rented here about 6 years ago and was appalled at the fees. i was additionally mad because they misquoted the council tax band the property was in (they, of course, said it was in a lower band than it was). if you are going to charge outrageous fees, at least get the information right.

It is horrendous. Daylight fucking robbery. No, the Scottish system isn't perfect, but it's a damn sight better than the English one. The "guess what happened to Scottish rents" line just doesn't cut it imo, lettings agencies should be fucking abolished.

I'm in Australia so it's a different system, but I have very little respect for people in the real estate industry at all. Having just bought my own first home, I can't wait to get off the rental treadmill. Real estate agents are, for the most part, a massive waste of money. They inflate prices for everybody and do very little to earn their cut. There is nowhere near enough transparency in the industry, and they have people over a barrel because housing is a basic need.

Apologies to any 'good' real estate people reading this; I know they exist. But generally I think the industry is full of shysters and profiteers.