A letting agency which appears to have accidentally sent an internal email to a disgruntled tenant has told its local paper that the language used in it was no more than office banter.
The email, seen by the Crawley News, landed in the inbox of tenant Shannon Capps.
Using words that would never get through EYE’s own bad language filter and so we cannot replicate them, the email was clearly sent by mistake to the tenant who wanted to terminate her contract.
Capps had found a room through the agency, but after moving in said she was unhappy with the state of the facilities at the property and the number of housemates.
After a series of phone calls and emails, she said she wanted to terminate the agreement and explained why.
She says the response then appeared in her inbox.
See the local newspaper report.
Comments (5)
Well that sounds super dodgy – I wonder how many of the tenant’s deposits are properly protected…
In fairness, the article is in relation to the frankly appalling and inexcusable error made by the Agent, not to any legal or procedural matters pertaining to the relationship with the Landlord.
If there is a story within a story, you can be guaranteed that Ros will be onto it as she was with last week’s £17 million ‘sale’.
I think they need to look at the agreement they are issuing as well, on the assumption that this is not a resident landlord.
The “tenant” should of been given an AST for the room rather than a “lodgers agreement”. The lodgers agreement would have probably not conformed with the legislative requirements.
I assume other issues such as deposit compliance, redress scheme membership, HMO management regulation obligations have all been missed as well. I think someone needs to complain to Crawley Trading Standards.
If I remember correctly (and it’s been a couple of years now) an AST can only be issued for a complete dwelling and is not legally acceptable when there are shared facilities.
A lodger’s agreement is only suitable when the owner is still in residence.
Renting a property by the room is real trouble.
I used to work in a lettings agency near a college and we dealt with a lot of tenants moving in and out of shared properties and it was always most complicated when just one of the tenants wanted to go. I remember that the defining issue was that of shared kitchens and bathrooms.
While this is a good headline – surprised you havent commented on other interesting aspects of the story such as highly suspicious activities such as the lettings firm operating out of the estate agents without any direct contact details yet they are not associated with the sales office??
Also there are some pretty serious allegations against the firm looking at the comments