How Much Do London Letting Agents Really Charge?
*St James Park, London
One of the reasons why people don’t want to rent through the letting agent is because they have heard horror stories about how much they charge for their services. It might be a bit less safe to give that holding deposit to a private person but hey – at least you know you don’t have to pay any mysterious sums to get the flat.
Patrick Collinson shares his view in The Guardian about how letting agents have screwed everybody during the boom years charging ridiculous amounts for their service:
It strikes me that the main project of the lettings business over the past 10 years of buy-to-let madness has been to:
a) charge extraordinary fees to first-time landlords; b) try charging the same fees to the tenant; c) charge it all again at the end of the six-month shorthold tenancy; and d) disappear as soon as the landlord or the tenant needs something done.
I love the makey-up world of letting agents and their preposterous fees. The huge finder’s fee to landlords and as much as £400 to tenants for “administration” – which amounts to a few pieces of photocopied contracts. A credit check fee (£150?). An inventory fee (£80?). An insurance fee. A checking out fee. A cleaning fee. They simply make up these charges as they go along, hoping that the mainly young clientele think they have no choice but to pay up. These vulnerable young people, often laden down with student debt, are hit with a load of tripe. They are spurious items which, if they have any basis in fact, should fall on the landlord, not the tenant.
The Association of Residential Letting Agents ARLA is currently eagerly waiting for the government to regulate the business as more and more agents turn to lettings but who knows how long that will take. In the meanwhile, we think there are things that could be done right now to help make the market become more transparent, and service providers more trustworthy.
ARLA should ask their member agents to publish the fees on their websites.
You don’t go to the shop and call the cashier for the price for each item you get, do you? Most of the letting agent listings do not display a tag with the real price, and this does make renters cautious. Who knows how much they charge – I’d rather find a home advertised by the owner at Gumtree, even if there are more risks involved in dealing with the private person.
We think the tenants should be able to conveniently see all the costs that renting through letting agent involves in order to be able to plan ahead, and compare different service providers. Either show them in the listing or on a separate page that could be easily found.
Adding a little transparency would be really good for the market. It would be a steady step towards gaining back that trust the letting agents seem to have lost in public’s eyes.
Hi there, I’m a 21 year old university student who is very worried about the risks involved when signing up to a contract with an estate agent. A year ago, naive me and three other students went to view a flat along with a representative from the estate agents; Your Move. The four bed property was well presented, but it also was well above our price-range. The representative knew this but assured us that she could probably “have a word” and “sort something out”. It screamed sophistication, independence and freedom! We really did like the place and she knew it. I started to feel uncomfortable as she sensed the excitement within the group, but a few well rehearsed lines were slipped in here and there and soon we were all convinced that there were was another potential buyer on the way who was very interested, and if we wanted to secure the flat we must place a deposit before 5 p.m. that day.
Off we ran to the nearest cash point, withdrew a total of £280 from our precious student loans and straight to the Your Move Agency. They had our contracts ready and waiting still warm from the printer. I can’t recall the exact amount they had wanted from us, but I do know we were being charged for credit checks, even though all of us had opened our very first student accounts that same year. We were also being ripped off for the cost of inventories. There must have been a lot of other ‘expenses’ as the grand total per student including our deposits came up to over £1200 each. They had somehow claimed £400 for their “services.” It didn’t matter that in order for us to pay the rent, we would have had to up the hours from our part-time student jobs and almost completely neglect our degrees. Luckily some ones relative intervened and we pulled out. We only ever got £140 back, which we shared between us.
This year I’ll be going through another property hunt. If you have any advice on how we can avoid this sort of thing, please let us know.
Eagerly awaiting a reply.
Josh.
i did avoid renting agency recently by making a deal straight with the owner or the landlord of the flat..it,s the only way my freind