Our nightmare experience in using a letting agent
From our experience, the Roscoe Rogers & Knight Lettings agency in Monmouth, fully and completely created a situation that you explicitly use an agent to avoid. They found us a "suitable" tenant who failed checks, including having CCJs, no employment was checked (it was fictional) and there were previous evictions for non payment of rent. To cut a long story short, we were concerned within a month of the tenancy commencing (including reports of ASB, police raids etc!), and no rent and questioned the agents for info. Instead of coming clean and saying they had made a mistake and misled us and tried to resolve the situation together, we were fed lies by phone with no answer to questions by email. This culminated in over 2 years of grief - with much of the emotional stress being caused as direct result of the agents failing and refusing to engage, as well as significant legal and emotional costs. For instance, when we initially asked for copies of the reference and finance checks, we were explicitly told there was none on record as not required when there as a guarantor (not the service we had paid for)....Just one example - we finally saw a copy of the failed referencing only through the Ombudman involvement much later. Again, with the guarantor, there was only a name within our copy of the contract. We later found out it was the council housing dept who were the guarantor and there was significant housing and social services involvement and history. This detail and that the guarantee was only for 6 months, were conveniently not included within the contracts provided to ourselves by the agents, and never produced, despite numerous requests for information why no rent had been received. It was only our solicitor that managed to gain a copy of the guarantor document from the council themselves (still not the agents who had apparently organised and requested it!).
The covid situation exacerbated and prolonged the situation, although Roscoe Rogers & Knight's catalogue of professional errors and incompetence prolonged and made the whole situation much, much worse by their refusal to admit or attempt to resolve before spiralling.
In short, the house was trashed, baliff eviction required, numerous police raids and ASB reports, insignificant rent received, and huge legal fees and clearance/repair required.
Although Roscoe Rogers and Knight have never acknowledged any mistakes, apologised or shown any professionalism towards us, the Property Ombudsman eventually found that they had failed at least 12 different paragraphs of the Code of Practice requirements and caused "aggravation, distress and inconvenience" etc to us as a result on several counts.
Happy to provide the full report!
June 6, 2022
Unprompted review