Beware if you’re a business.
We rented a house for a company let business in May 2019 from Frank Innes Mapperley.
Before we did, we made our intentions known that we will like to rent for 5 years. We were encouraged to go ahead by James Derby.
We thus didn’t hold back and spent our money to renovate this property with the hope that we will be spending 5 years in it which will enable us get our money back.
However we now know it was a trap to use us to help them fully renovate the property and get it valued.
After the initial 6 months, they refused to renew so I started looking for another place.
One day in November, I sent James an email to let him know I had found another place and within 5 minutes I received a renewal email from him for another 6 months.
Me and my colleagues in our office were very surprised and knew James was trying to pin us down. You informed us that the landlord is not renewing but when I got another place, we received a renewal. We suspected they were looking for a way to hold on to us for their own benefit without committing. Please note that houses are valued higher when they are fully occupied.
This next 6 months tenancy James suddenly emailed to me would then end in March 2020.
When it was about 3 months into our first 6 months, Jessica contacted us to show us a house which can be used as a company let. We were so disappointed when we got there as the house had a lot of health and safety issue in it. What alarmed us most was when she said the landlord wanted to let it out for just 6 months. Wow, we walked away immediately. Glad Jessica Cranmer told us the truth. We especially turned it down because of the experience of we were having with the house we rented from them 3 months before and the fact that we had to use our own money to renovate another person’s property. This is not a problem if we have a 3-5 years tenancy. We thought 🤔 so they wanted us to do the-same with this one.
In February 2020, James started disturbing us with emails to enable them value the house before the end of our tenancy.
We asked a lot of times why this sudden valuation? Why wasn’t this property valued before we moved in? What is the purpose of the valuation?
We were again and again reassured and told it is for information purposes only as the landlord just wanted to know how much it is now worth.
Then the lockdown from COVID 19 started which stopped everyone from trading.
Immediately the lockdown was lifted, James Darby and Jessica Cranmer came back to ask for a valuation again. With a lot of doubt, we accepted.
A week after the valuation we were given a section 21 to pack up and leave.
We were so shocked and couldn’t believe this. We asked ourselves why did we believed them. They have succeeded to use us to get this house renovated and revalued.
If we knew their plan, we wouldn’t have rented the house in the first place because we never wanted a six months tenancy period. However we didn’t know, we trusted and believed them which made us to spend that much on a house which belongs to someone else.
Below are some of the ongoing renovations we were carrying out on this house.
1. We painted every month
2. We laid carpet in the whole house except for the stairs
3. We maintained the very large garden (very expensive)
4. We changed light bulbs
5. We repaired a broken toilet
6. We installed vertical blinds into the whole house - a very huge property.
7. We got the property fire safe and spent our money to buy all the equipment we were asked to buy by the Nottingham Fire Services (we invited them in to help us figure out what we needed) - this took us almost 5 months
Etc.
(we spent a lot more as a result of the effect of the damage from the leaking roof)
This roof was repaired so many times by the landlord but we had to continue to repaint, redecorate, and take off mould which formed in the house as a result of the leak.
We have photos of what the house looked like when we moved in, and what it looks like now.
It is ridiculous for them to think any business will be happy to take up a house for a short term and spend a lot on it. We have no problems with renovating a landlords house if we get a 3 to 5 years tenancy.
In this case, we were used and dumped.
Beware if you are a business.








