I would advise staying away
I would advise staying away from this agency.
We mainly dealt with Ray. Our first interaction was him telling us that the keys to the flat were not in the office and that he couldn't do the viewing at 6pm like we agreed. He then managed to track them down and do the viewing at 8pm. He managed to make up for the agency's mistake and probably stayed late to accommodate us, so I'll give him that. He gave us a good tour and answered our questions, and we felt like we could make an offer. Upon visiting I realised one of my friends had lived in the same flat in the past, so I reached out to him and he warmed me that part of what Ray had said was false (nothing crucial, for example the fact that the landlord was easily reachable when in reality he had never been in contact with the landlord directly throughout his tenancy). He also warned me that Carter & Reeves they took a while to deal with issues, only after insisting a lot. Apparently they were pretty incompetent overall.
We made an offer regardless. Halfway through the process an agent called Michael was added to the conversation. The only thing he did was to apologise about forgetting to send us the floor plans, which we never received.
We agreed on a start date with them, then they asked to push this start date twice due to renovations happening in the flat, which we reluctantly agreed to. Then we finally signed the contract, with a September 12th start date. A week before moving in they wanted to push the move in date again to the 20th and did not offer any compensation, while all of us had already planned on arriving/being in London the week after. Given that the contract was signed, we argued that they were supposed to accommodate or compensate us in some way since they weren't abiding by the terms, but they kept arguing against that without providing any proof.
A couple days later (on the 9th, 3 days before the supposed move in date), before the first issue was resolved, they mentioned that some of us had not passed referencing, and asked to draft a new contract where we would have to provide guarantors, despite the fact that they mentioned we wouldn't need them when we visited the flat. The contract we signed did not mention anything about referencing, and was definitely still holding up, so we tried to stick to it, but the agents once again threw a couple more unfounded arguments which did not hold up (I checked with legal professionals) to try to get us to draft a new contract, which would obviously benefit them on that first issues as well.
When we tried to get more formal with them about respecting the terms of the contract, they stopped responding for 2 days, and didn't reply to calls. When Ray finally picked up, they once again gave a bad argument referring to an off topic section of the contract. Then they mentioned they wouldn't know when the flat would be available at all. They offered us another apartment, which we could visit on the day and move in to at a discount, but that flat was very dirty and of poor quality. We had to urgently look elsewhere with only a few days remaining. They did send our money back when we found something else.
I think that threatening some form of legal action is the only way to get your point across with these agents. It's probably better to stay away.






