to think that renters get a raw deal

[Catza]

I am in a quite an interesting position as I am currently buying a house but need to rent in the meantime.
I noticed that the treatment of renters by EAs is vastly different from buyers. Nothing about my circumstances changed: my earnings are the same, my savings are the same, I have the same job and I am the exactly same person. Yet.. when I contact EA to view a property, they are polite and helpful. When I contact one to enquire about a viewing of rental, they treat me with high suspicion, write almost confrontational emails with a long list of demands and generally make me feel like a second class citizen.
OpenRent which I have used many many time in the past has done downhill massively as well. Landlords who book viewings but don't provide property address and then disappear. Many are "away next week" and promise to get back to me, then ghost even after chasing. This morning, I had to report yet another landlord to OpenRent for failing to respond.

If anyone has been in a similar situation, did you feel this too? Or am I being a bit too sensitive due to normal house buying stress?

AIBU = I have never experienced this myself
AINBU = yes, I also feel like I am being treated poorly as a renter by EA at the enquiry stage.

I completely agree OP, renting is a dehumanising, infantilising process. We have just moved out of rented as we have bought and I am already arguing with the estate agents as they tried to add additional contractual clauses to the inventory that they forgot to add to the actual contract, and are now trying to get us to pay for things like a professional carpet clean on a dusty, musty old house with carpets that are easily 20+ years old and were certainly not professionally cleaned when we moved in!

They think all renters are stupid and desperate and will just settle for anything. And it’s outrageous that you have to provide more financial and personal information to a rental agency than you do a mortgage company.

I agree, small landlords have way too much emotion attached to their properties. We rented off a landlord who had inherited her grandmother’s property and she wouldn’t leave us alone. Kept making comments about how we kept the garden and the length of the grass etc. We weeded regularly and kept it well but liked the grass slightly longer as the insects prefer it. In the end she served us a section 21 and kicked us out and moved her son in - costing us thousands and resulting in us having to actually move towns as we couldn’t find another rental in that town.

We've rented our house for nearly 10 years and have just been served a S21. I expect the landlord either wants to get out before the new laws come in, or he wants to do the place up and put it back on for more rent than we can afford.

We've been model tenants the whole time, have only ever asked for about five or six things to be fixed in that time. There were plenty of things the landlord just didn't seem bothered about. When he was remortgaging a couple of years ago, he had to come around with an independent expert to look at the damp, which we'd told him about several times. The guy said it wasn't too bad (still not great, though) and it would only take a few changes to the property to fix. The landlord said, "well, you expect some damp in a rental property" which just says it all, really. The expert guy was stunned he said that, and so were we. No, it's not dripping down the walls or anything, but it's still damp and causing mould!

So now we're stressing trying to find somewhere to rent that's close enough to both DC's schools, and it's going to cost us hundreds if not thousands of pounds to move when we eventually find somewhere to go. The really galling thing is that we were planning on buying our own place by the end of the year, because we've got the deposit saved and just needed to wait a few more months to start looking. We could've done it last year but we wanted to see which high school DD got into, first.

We've had 5 landlords in our time. Only one of them wasn't a total knob.