Be Excellent To Each Other

Scum of the earth, or what?

Has anybody ever had any joy negotiating with these bloodsucking vultures?

We've finally found a house to move into and it's going to cost us the best part of £2,000 to fucking move in!

This breaks down as follows:

Month's rent in advance: £600
Deposit: £700

(These are both expected and fine, of course.)

Then you have to pay £200 to "reserve" the place. This makes them take it off the market, and it comes off your fees if you're granted a tenancy. If your application fails, they keep it. Of course, I don't anticipate our application failing.

Drafting of tenancy agreement: £150 (a standard form contract with spaces for our names)
Admin fee of £50 per tenant: £100
Referencing fee of £75 per tenant: £150 (I assume this is a credit check, which in actuality costs about £10 to perform)
"Check in fee": £72 ("minimum")
Guarantor referencing fee: £75
Agreement of guarantee: £75 (unfortunately, it looks as though we'll need a guarantor as with this place)
Pet negotiation fee: £75 (We have guinea pigs, a rabbit and a lizard. This is apparently fine, but they're going to charge us £75 to "negotiate" this with the landlord.)

That's a total of £2,197.00 to move into a £600/pcm house. Less the £200 we'll get knocked off from our "reservation fee", totalling £1,997.00. Of course, we don't lose the deposit (we hope), and rent is a given, but this letting agent is rinsing us for £697 in fees! That can't be right, surely?

I have read somewhere that the tenancy agreement fee cannot be charged for twice by law - so if they're charging the landlord for that as well (which they undoubtedly are), they're doing so illegally.

Where do I stand here? Anybody managed to negotiate this sort of thing down before? Bearing in mind that they could basically tell us to like it or lump it really. We really want the house (they don't know that yet, of course), but what's stopping them holding out for someone who will swallow this shit?

Renting is easy!

That's way way way more (in fees) than we have ever paid, to move into places twice (or more) as expensive. In London.

That's a very bad agency.

I really hate the thought of renting.

I don't have any constructive advice, but wish you luck with it.

Thanks, GJ!

Curio - in our (limited) experience, this is way above and beyond what we paid last time! We did pay some fees, but they amounted to a couple of hundred quid tops if I recall. And half of that was the guarantor fee shite.

That seems pretty horrendous, WTB. I had a similar referencing fee with the agency I'm with which was around £70-£80 I think and then besides the usual rent in advance and deposit, I pay a £15 admin fee every six months when a bloke comes round to check everything is ok and I sign for another six months. This is my second house with them so at least when I moved in here I didn't need to pay the referencing fee again. All pretty agreeable.

Those fees are almost certainly not agreeable, the thieving shits. They do fuck all for cash money? Tell em to fuck off.

That seems pretty fucking insane to me WTB.

We rented for a fair few years up until we bought in early 2007, and I never came across any shit like that with any of the properties we rented.

We did on some places go through letting 'managers' I suppose you'd call them but not actually wholesale 'agencies' as such, and it was always just two months' rent to move in basically - one month's rent upfront and one month's rent as a deposit (which we always got back in full after we'd moved out). I've never even fucking heard of all that shit they're trying to gouge out of you, what more security can they want beyond a month's rent upfront and a month's rent safely in the bank? Vampiric motherfuckers.

Can you get a bit closer to the landlord perhaps, in terms of cutting out the middlemen?

I remember the best rental we ever had was from the IOM's Salvation Army, who owned a vacant property on a housing estate. One of their officers posted on our intranet about it and I called him up directly, he then showed us around the place and we shook hands on the spot to agree - and they then employed a local advocate to do all the paperwork and stuff, but with absolutely the minimum of faff or expense. (And they didn't charge us anything for the advocate's time either.)

Point being, I think the closer you can get to the actual landlord, the better you might fare in cutting all this shit out, but of course it's a long time since I've been involved with the UK rental market. Over here on the IOM we do have agencies and suchlike, but it's also quite possible to just read the classifieds in the local paper and call the landlord up directly, is that not still possible in the UK?

Basically by paying that money you are saying to them (and the landlord), "I will take any shit you throw at me."

The landlord actually maintains the garden (no idea why), so I'm hoping to get to know him and tempt to cut out the middle man 6 months down the line. Cheaper rent for me if he doesn't have to pay these swindling buggers their monthly cut!

I honestly doubt the landlord will be aware of it. They get gouged as well!

If he doesn't know, he doesn't care, if he doesn't care about that, he doesn't care about you. ergo, anything goes wrong, tough shit.

That's not necessarily true, the agency could be telling the landlord some or all or none of what they're actually gouging out of the tenants.

The story the agency presents to the landlords and the story they present to the tenants could be two very different things, with them creaming off huge amounts of cash in the grey area that neither landlord or tenant is aware of in terms of each other's situation.

My experience with renting is that the closer you get to the landlord and owner of the property, the better things are.

We did rent one house where we went entirely through a 'manager' and it was a bit weird, we never even knew what the people whose house it was looked like, to them it was just a commodity, I didn't like it at all.

Houses are for fucking living in, not for parasites on a basic human need to financially gorge themselves with.

AE is spot on, I feel. I think they gouge both parties whilst keeping them at arm's length from each other.

There's a bit about unfair fees here. See the bit about complaining.
http://england.shelter.org.uk/get_advic ... g_agencies

Yeah there's a lot online about it. Plenty of recent news stories, too. Most of it is advice for reclaiming fees, though. Not much I can do from my current position as far as I can tell. It all depends how desperate they are to let this house out to us as to how far I'll be able to push them on their fees. The other option is swallowing it and then complaining afterwards, but that's stupid.

(But thanks for that link, Wullie. Reading it now.)

Wasn't there a BeeX tale about letting some years ago - someone wanted to negotiate a contract as they were unhappy with the wording and was seeking advice. I remember their partner/wife was a solicitor in a different field of work but went in to the letting agency and quite easily agreed changes to the draft contract.

If your heart is set on this place you should totally arrange a time to go and do that.

Oh I'll definitely be attempting to negotiate with them tomorrow (using my mad lawyer skillz), but there's only so far you can get with negotiations if you're not necessarily in a position of power. This house has only been advertised for less than a week. I imagine they're not too arsed about shifting it just yet. I think we were the first people to view it. (We've been watching Rightmove on a daily basis for a few months now.)

There's a company around here that are letting out some properties that only have planning permission to be used exclusively as holiday lodges.

Yes we have told the agency (who don't care) and the council (who do but who will probably do fuck all).

The agency I was using to rent my old house out were pretty much dishonest liars, of course you don't know this until it's too late. There's a reason why they are one of the least popular professions.

As a landlord. I prefer to use agents takes the hassle out of it. They sort everything and i get my share of the rent.

Probably apocryphal story on Popbitch a few years back from someone who said they once lived in a house owned by Shakin' Stevens, and Shaky himself would sometimes come and collect the rent. The house did not have a green door.

I'm not sure why one should have to pay anything other than the rent and deposit. After all, the landlord has commissioned the agency to solicit for tenants and engage with them... let the landlord pay it. I wouldn't care how much I like a house, this sort of gouging would be the 'bad start' I'd take as a warning sign and move on.

Just as the 'basic human need' of housing mentioned above is abused by the greedy and lazy, those seeking a new house are often willing to forego their dignity somewhat to live in the place of their choice. If everyone refused to pay their shitty fees they'd soon drop them and the worse agents would fold.

Still, I know none of the details and as I'm freeloading off my wife who's a tenancy guru by profession, I speak from a position of smart-arsed ignorance.

Very much

The agent will be getting their cut from the landlord, either in the form of taking the first month's rent in it's entirety, or a percentage of the monthly rent if their management of the property is on an ongoing basis.

Anything else is excessive, as far as I'm concerned.

Aye, I have to pay a fee to get someone in to cover all the "admin charges" as the landlord.

Also, I use an agent because I don't want to have to talk to my tenant or give them my contact details, that's the point of using an agent They deal with all the shit that comes with being a landlord, that's why I give them 10%.
Trying to cosy up to the owner most likely won't be appreciated.

I'm not sure how much we paid to sort it out, but we sucked it up due to needing somewhere fast. The current place we are in was bought by a woman in her early thirties in 2009 for c£120k. She then died, suddenly, and the house is now seemingly owned by what I assume to be her parents, brother and sister, judging from the tenancy agreement. A while back, we did have half a mind to write to them all, individually, and offer them 25K each for the house and wait for one of them to say "Yes". If the agents take 10%, then £25k upfront is better than £120 a month income for an individual. Then, I dicided I don't want to live there anymore, because of the poor people not cleaning up their dog shit on the pavements, whichs eems to have gotten worse.

The problem I had with the management service I used was that I wanted them to act as a first point of contact for the tenants, but then to pass requests on to me unless it was an emergency. As it was my old house I'm letting out I was happy to do most jobs myself and knew what was likely to break.

Unfortunately the agency decide to ignore my written instructions that they had accepted and started booking their own overpriced tradesmen in to do work and not tell me about it until afterwards, so they got told to GFY.

In addition, when the initial 6 months tenancy was up they tried to charge £200 to me and the same to the tenants to extend it, with all sorts of warnings about potential problems if I just let it turn into a statutory periodic tenancy which was far too much for basically changing the date in a couple of places and popping it in the post.

I use letting agents as it takes the risk away from being a landlord.

They do the credit checks, and inspect the property. Yes it does cost me a small fee a month.

The one that WTB has in the OP.... my god that is mental! I can understand LAs charging for a credit check but not all that.

May or may not be in point here, but I'm aware of some Letting Agencies around these parts offering very cheap deals to Landlords to get them to use them. Estate Agents have obviously taken a hit from the decline in the sale market and need the letting arms to bring home the bacon, and they can't do that without properties on the books. Therefore the angle that they are taking from both sides excessively may be slightly unjust.

That said, it looks on the face of it like a disingenious Easyjet/Ryanair pricing model for tenants of "Look - pretty house at low rent" for the additional add on costs to then be front loaded once you've fallen in love with the place. The only way you can work out if you're being ripped off is to compare the total cost for your length of your planned stay with a comparable house with a different, non front-loaded agent. Difficult to do, as houses are of course individually unique products.

I've been charged £60 for the privilege of handing my keys back. Should have argued that point when I signed the contract - when I get news of how much they're taking from the deposit for cleaning etc I might quibble, but doubt it'll do anything.

We've sealed the deal, pending some sort of referencing fuck up I guess. Got them to waive a hefty portion of the fees. No more noisy neighbours! Well, I fucking hope so.

Excellent news!

So they were just fucking chancing it then with all those fees?

Shady bastards.

Good work!

I think so! I was immediately passed to "the manager" who then immediately knocked a load of the fees off. Whole telephone call was over in less than 10 minutes.

Our new letting agency seems like fun.

"We can let and manage for 10% and £300 up front "

" No, 8% and £200"

"Ok, Mr Paz. "

Result.

Just noticed this thread - when renting I have never paid anything other than a deposit and first month's rent, and that was in london. WTF is going on up north?

Pigs in baths and stuff.

Pies.

And gouging cunts

The rich are getting richer! Same old, same old!

BURN THE LANDLORDS!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... e-to-build

When 'houses' turned into 'investments' a little bit of humanity died.