Estate Agents...

I have to admit that I have loathed estate agents from the moment I first heard the words 'and then there's our fees...', but as time goes by, they do nothing to make me like them more.

The first time I rented through an agent, my little bedsit had only two radiators, one of which was recorded as non-functional on the inventory, and the other of which I, on my first day in the flat, discovered was also not working. The toilet, I also discovered while going through the inventory, had once been screwed to the floor but, by that time, had become so rusted by the water leaking from the soil pipe that the screws were now non-descript metal pegs which did nothing to hold the fixture in place.

I let them know of these issues within forty-eight hours of moving into the property, and yet when I moved out after just under a year, nothing had been done about them - or numerous other, smaller issues - at all.

So suck it, Bairstow Eves of Nottingham, Notts, UK (a subsidiary of Countrywide lettings...).

After the end of my degree course and that tenancy, I moved back in with family, and eventually took out a joint tenancy with two family members in a house found through - despite my doubts - another estate agent.

We were actually shown the house by one of the two owners, who - as it turns out - misinformed us. The estate agents were the unlucky messengers of the news that we would not, as we had been told, have any access to the garden shed - and so precisely where we were supposed to store any tools with which to keep the garden in order (as demanded by the tenancy agreement) were unclear.

It has to be noticed that this was not the estate agent's fault. Neither was it technically their fault that every unanswered question we had for the landlord took weeks to be answered - it was simply the result of having a middle man relaying questions and answers between tenants and landlords who hadn't really grasped that the estate agent cannot answer questions that the landlord hasn't prepared them for...

So all was more-or-less well - or at least understandable - on the estate agent front (although I still disliked them on the basis of extortionate fees). Until today.

Today - the twenty-ninth of May, 2013, we received a letter which should have politely reminded us that we have previously agreed to return to property at the end of July.

Written and signed by the estate agent, it was entitled 'Notice to Vacate' and worded in such a way that - until I turned over the page and saw the pre-agreed date - I thought we were being kicked out. It was a pre-agreed date. It shouldn't be hard to word a letter in a neutral, non threatening tone, but apparently this agency's approach to landlord/tenant relations is not to try to keep both happy but to play each party off against the other and therefore prevent either from realising that they are both being charged an unthinkable amount of money for a shoddy service delivered with bad attitude and too much make-up.

So Sims Williams can bite me.