Renting/Rip off estate agents/llords

[Littlepleasures]

So angry. Only a month to find a new home to rent. Found somewhere suitable, put in application and willing to pay £100 for reference, credit checking although can’t understand why it costs this much for what is probably a few clicks of a mouse. There are three of us so will be £300. Find out this morning there have been several applications so ll/estate agents want all applicants to pay for credit checks (non refundable) before making a decision!! As if finding two months rent in advance, all previous land lords finding weird and wonderful reasons for not giving full deposit back and private rentals being extortionate anyway, they’ve now found another way to screw private tenants over. Is this legal? I know our credit references will be fine but suspect this is a deliberate ploy to make as much out of vulnerable people as possible. We can’t affordto pay £300 each time just to apply and maybe still not end up with a home!!!

That’s a ridiculous cost for a credit check!!

Why is it so high? I can get a free credit score with all my credit history on the money saving expert website.

That’s insane, fees if the property is definitely yours is one thing but that’s ridiculous.

Ridiculous. I thought this profiteering was being stamped on. If you have the time, write to your local paper and your local council and your MP.

We had to do that too, there were only two of us though and fortunately we did have the flat but then had to stump up an extra £500 estate agent fees and then a ridiculous deposit. I don't know if it's legal or not but it seems to be fairly common.

They are such a rip off, we've recently signed a contract extension and they charged us £175 for the privilege.

I have never come across this -i think it isn't allowed in Scotland?

I think it's disgusting.

Good idea about writing to MP and local council. The frustration and anger comes from feeling so powerless in a vulnerable situation. Will send a copy to the estate agents. Last went through the process3 yrs ago and never had this to deal with. Think I will phone round all the estate agents to see if it’s common practice now. Given that rents are so high anyway I’ve always thought the cost of vetting tenants should be the llord’s responsibility.

Nah they can pass the cost on to the tenant because there is such high demand and people are so desperate for a home they will pay it. It’s awful. I applied for a rental a few years ago and went into the office with my form and said I could pay deposit and first months rent straight away as had already viewed house and spoken to the owner (it was my neighbour), agent said ok but needed something like £30 for the credit check. I went out to the cash machine across the road to get the £30 and in the 4-5 minutes it took me to get back someone else had been in and paid the whole lot so they’d signed the contract and everything there and then!

Any estate agents on here? Is this common practice now? What does a credit/ references check involve? How long does it take. Is £100 a fair price?

If I was a bird - no honour among thieves they say.............

We are private LL by default
We do credit checks for our tenants free of charge, they only pay us a deposit nothing else.
Our checks cost us around £15 and take no more than 1 or 2 hours form filling.
Agents soon wont be able to charge tenants so rents will rise as the cost will be passed on to the LL

It's the norm here plus 'deposit to hold the house'. I'm now having to pay 120 pounds to renew my contract. Tell me how does it cost that much to print papers for me to sign?!!! Ridiculous.

Just phoned another local estate agent to see if it’s a general industry policy. He said they don’t do it, it’s bad practice but the large corporate chains have a bad reputation for it. Would it be libel for me to name and shame them?

Is there any government body with responsibility for regulating the rental market?

I work for a letting agent. We charge £40 for the application fee. We use an external company to do our credit checks, they do credit checks plus landlord and employment checks. (they charge us about £18, I think, per application, so we do make a bit of money on it).

If there are several people who apply at the same time and we send all applications off (which is rare as we don't want to waste people's money) we will try our best to house the candidates who don't get that particular house - so if they've passed the credit and reference checks we will ask them if we can hold on to their details and try and get them somewhere else.

We do charge an admin fee as well for the production of the paperwork, which is £70 per tenancy. Some other agencies charge the full fee - application and admin up front, but we only charge the admin fee to the successful candidates.

I work for a small company and from what I can see from my end, there is a lot of work involved and we don't seem to be making a lot of money,.

Thing is all these checks are for the ladlord's benefit so they should be paying for them. Not least became they could set them against tax. And I say this as someone who was an accidental landlord at one point.

In your shoes I signed up for noddle (free credit check, but there are likely others who do it free too) and printed all of our reports out
They still screwed me for all of the other fees, but the letting agents accepted that and it saved us £75 Per person.

I work for a letting agent/property management and we charge tenants £60 for referencing/credit check.

They have abolished tenant fees in Scotland and are seemingly doing the same in England soon enough. What will happen then is all the fees tenants are currently charged will be (somehow, indirectly) passed on to the landlords which will mean landlords will put rents up to factor in those extra charges - so the tenants will still be paying the extra but just in rent rather than fees at the start of tenancy. (Ie a £60 fee would be the equivalent of putting the monthly rent up by £5 a month)

Still fairer as then the landlord will pay tax on it.

That’s madness , we are landlords but rent and manage the houses ourselves. The last tenant we found by advertising on gumtree . It’s a risk you take in finding a good tenant but we aren’t prepared to pay an estate agent ridiculous fees and for tenants to be ripped off too .

I've privately rented two properties in the last 10 years (out of it now). The first one was great. Landlord good, professional and organised and the Agent (we now realise) was a dream!

Second property - landlord was as clued up as a fart in a bag (lost all his half of paperwork, didn't know what was in inventory when it came to contents of garage ect) and the agents ... well. They twice sent the first set of agreements to the wrong house. Two years in we discovered they were charging both us AND the landlord nearly 200 quid EACH for the renewal of contracts. This was not even for sending us any actual physical printed paper - £200 for just an email copy of all the same words, different date, with e signature required! Apart from the extortionate price, i discovered that charging two parties for one service is illegal.

What with this and the (what we found out later was) deliberate lies they fed us about the damp being sorted properly before we moved in we decided the agents were - what is known in the rental community as - Cunts.

Thing is all these checks are for the ladlord's benefit so they should be paying for them. Yes, cos the tenant doesn't benefit from being seen to be a solvent, credible tenant at all, do they?

It isn't just credit checking any more, so there is a bit more to it, like playing at being a customs officer and checking the would be renter's Right to Rent status. That has only added to the possibilities for some agencies.

Once scheme that might yet be deemed fairest is that the tenant pays for their 'screening' and that the cost s set by the government. But that assumes a single gateway to all the needed data, which doesn't quite exist yet, but I suspect it ill, and then we'll all be invited to have ID chips implanted, the day after we get Smart meters fitted .

But until the fees are banned, early next year (at the moment) LLs and Ts alike are at the mercy of some unscrupulous agents.

No, in this instance there's no benefit to the tenant whatsoever.

boring old facts among the usual ranting....

• landlords have legal responsibilities. Agents are totally unregulated. No politician of any political colour has noticed this. Fees are indeed ridiculous.
• supply and demand - London by any chance? Cowboy country where shitholes rented by crooks go for a fortune. That's what happens when you have 70 million people in a country with infrastructure for 50 million, all in the bottom corner and with a population that won't pay more tax.
• here in not-London referencing costs much less. my sympathies if you have to live in a big city.
• tenants fees are not yet illegal in England but will be at some point. at that stage the London landlords will simply charge more rent, although at least by then the tenant will have a property. The rest of us won't charge more rent as the current market won't stand it. This may reduce the number of private landlords but I assure you it won't magic up council houses, so rents may go up.

Credit checks are normally only £50pp which is the referencing fee. Anything else is the estate agent scamming money for themselves in fees.

BTW the reason sensible landlords check so thoroughly is because once a tenant is in, they can sit there paying no rent for months until eviction. Landlords are the only people legally compelled to provide a service where the customer has stopped paying. Hence the extreme caution.

yes, yes, I know, super rich landlords, can afford to do this, yadda yadda yadda. Those of you who run a business rather than simply have sex with someone who does will get it.

Did you miss the bit where I said I was a landlord? Of course the checks should be made - at the expense of the party they protect.