Just Lets

I’m sure that somewhere in the universe, a good letting agency must exist, who deal with your problems quickly and efficiently, are friendly and approachable and who don’t rip you off, either by hiking your rent up due to their fees or skanking you of your deposit at the end of your tenancy. It’s not Just Lets though. In fairness to them, they were more ineffectual than actually evil — they did give us the majority of our deposit back at the end of our two-​year tenancy (and so they bloody should have done — we repainted the walls for them!) but our biggest problem with them was they were just useless. Our boiler didn’t work properly for pretty much the entire time we were in the house, meaning that sometimes for weeks at a time the only hot water we had in the house came from the electric shower. I wouldn’t have minded so much if we had been renting off a private landlord, at least that way you aren’t paying above the odds to give an agency a cut, but it really irks me that both we (through our higher rent) and the landlord were paying the letting agency to do a job — to efficiently maintain the property and deal with any problems that arise — and they weren’t doing it. It seems that all they thought was in the job description was to process our paperwork and take a hefty agency fee from each one of us for the privilege.