As a student I don’t have the capital nor finances to rent my own house/apartment during my studies and therefore have to band together with friends and rent somewhere together. I’ve recently been through a lot of experiences in relation to deposits and general dealings with agencies/landlords.

In Brighton, the city containing my university; there are a large number of lettings agencies with an extensive list of houses for rent by students or the general public. One of these agencies was the go-between between us and our landlord.

According to Rip-Off Britain’s page on naming and shaming ‘Businesses don’t like bad publicity. Customer retention is vital to a company of any size…’ I thought it would be a good idea to let other students know of my experiences and let them decide for themselves. The lettings agency in question is Kendrick Property Services. They provided us with a 5 bedroom house in a sought after location near the center of the city.

We had all sorts of problems with them from the get-go, contacting the landlord through them seemed to be near impossible the majority of the time. Issues we faced were, for example: damp in one of the lower bedrooms to a mattress that felt more like a medieval torture device than something you sleep on.

Now it’s probably worth mentioning that you are probably going to get some sort of issue with any sort of rented accommodation you take on with a tenancy agreement. After a few months of constant phone calls and arrangements we had fixed or found compromises for the issues at hand.

When you go into a rented property for the first time it may not occur to you the things that are absolutely necessary to avoid falling into traps when it comes for you to leave the place. A few things to be wary of at the beginning include:

• Take photos of everything, right down to the smallest detail – you can’t overlook how important this is
• Keep a record of every piece of communication with the letting agent / landlord
• Keep any records of financial commitments and bills at hand
• Try if you can, to get the contact information for the landlord him/herself if the agent isn’t contactable
• Have at least one of you present when official visits are being made, also when the inventory is being taken
• Take note of dates, keep a record of them and challenge them if they are changed for no reason

There may be other things I have failed to include in the list above, but from my experience these are the most important. In nearly all tenancy agreements you will find a clause stating that it’s expected of you to return the house in the same condition that you found it when the end of the tenancy comes around. Don’t overlook this, as the bullet point above about taking photos is essential in making sure that the agency can’t sting money out of you for problems you didn’t cause.

We ran into problems around about three weeks ago from the posting of this blog. We were owed around £2k overall by the agency for our security deposit put down at the beginning and naturally, I had been warned by others that they may and try to sting money out of you either way just to make a profit. I passed this off as a myth at first; how wrong I was.

In a nutshell, the agency didn’t notify us about the correct method in getting the deposit back through the Deposit Protection Scheme, they listed a large number of charges for things which were either un-necessary, nothing to do with us or for problems that had already been rectified us prior to vacating the property.

One of my friends, a fellow tenant even agreed to fix one of the issues after we had left, going as far as getting to the house with a drill in hand to discover that the problem had already been fixed by the landlord without notifying us or the agency.

A good thing to do if you end up in a situation like I did is to get all the parents involved. Assuming there are five of you like there were with us, that’s five sets of parents you have on your back to fight your case for you.

You’ll find that with the careful wording and by recording all communication you have with them, they will be soon to back down if the allegations are false. Companies like these don’t want to go through legal action in case of their public image being tarnished. From our point of view, the fight is over; the deposit has been returned and the legal process supervised by DPS has been completed. Any request for payment from here on is unfound and without reason.

When going through these sorts of situations it’s a good idea to get your Student Union involved, they will have a huge interest!