Students, know your rights! (Private accommodation in general)

Member Name: ihatebroccoli

Product:	Private accommodation in general
Date:	06/11/00 (267 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Temporarily cheaper than buying, a roof over your head

Disadvantages: More expensive than buying in the long run, Landlords/ estate managers! who disrespect your tenant status

Beware of renting one of those “nice old houses” when you are a student in particular. If you do not have an extremely attentive landlord/ estate manager, you will be in for a hard slog getting them to fix the multitude of problems that inevitably come with living in an old house, and an old house that has been serially rented out to students at that! I ended up spending most of my second year at Uni, on the phone with the estate managers receptionist, trying to get him to fix our leaking roof/cut down the jungle (sorry, garden), so we could get out the front door/fit the long promised shower/fix the heating etc... etc... etc.. I could have had a degree in property management, never mind what I did study!

As Undergrads, we shared a house, one of those big old York stone houses, which was very damp and had a ridiculously huge rambling garden, which was never kept in any kind of order (we frequently had people wandering around the garden in the night from the nearby mental hospital!) A worrying thought! Recently I went past our old house, and have seen what they have done to the garden. Instead of cutting back some of the triffids and getting a tree surgeon in to manage the place, the landlord and his “band of merry murderers” simply burnt the garden down!!! Well, it’s much more manageable now I suppose, now that there’s nothing there but a cinder path!

We had a an estate manager (the landlord's monkey boy) of the same house, who would let himself in with his own keys to show people around, and when I was in the shared house seemingly on my own. I would be up in my room, thinking I was in the house alone, and would hear voices downstairs. So, off I went to investigate, and there he was with a girl and two boys, showing them our bathroom! I mean, I know it was a student house, but landlords (*or* estate managers) are always supposed to give written notice if they are coming to visit the property, and reall
y should have to ring the bell etc… as the house is the tenants *home* and they should be treated with respect and privacy, seeing as they *are* paying the landlord for the use of the property!

We also went without heating in December for two weeks, because the fictitious people he sent round to fix it never arrived. He would also, always have really pointless little jobs done immediately, such as putting a trellis up on the front of the house, but failing to fix the leaking kitchen roof for weeks! In a lot of cases, I’m not meaning for students really though, it is much cheaper to buy than to rent. If you know that you are going to be based in a certain location for a set period of time, say a couple of years, then it is far cheaper in the long run to buy, and if you keep up the basic maintenance, then you may even *make* money on the property when you come to sell.

Another factor to consider is: if you are sharing a rented house, make sure you know how many people the property will be housing, and if any major structural changes are due to be made while you are living there. The year before we moved in to the aforementioned property, there were 4 people in the house, and the rent was £38 per week. The year *we* moved in, the landlord got rid of the lounge (our only communal area save for the tiny damp kitchen), and made it into another bedroom, so there were five people in the house. One of the existing four remained in the house, and he was told that, because an extra person was living there, the rent would be lowered, but in actual fact, the landlord raised it by £3 and he never told any of the new residents!

We all had £200 bonds to pay before moving in, which would have deterred us from causing any deliberate damage, but unfortunately for us, most of the damage was made by the house itself. When I came to take my posters down at the end of the year, most of them wouldn’t come off because of the damp, and I had to do
a good old scrubbing job on Robert DeNiro’s face, to remove it from my walls.

When I moved in I suppose I should have know that there would be trouble, as there was a huge wasps nest outside my window and the wasps were constantly trying to get in. When I told the estate manager this, he joked that “perhaps I should keep my windows closed during the summer then”. I was this close to flying off the handle, but duly accepted his word that the matter would be dealt with ASAP. This was about the *only* thing that was dealt with properly in the whole time I lived there, and it was an extremely strange experience, waking the next morning to find four men in white space suits hovering outside my window with wasp zappers.

Anyway, so as not to completely scare you off renting, here are some of the things you should bear in mind:

1) Make sure you read the contract thoroughly, yours *as well* as the one the landlord signs.

2) Make sure you *always* have a written or verbal agreement with the landlord as to when they will be visiting the property.

3) Ensure that, as long as there is someone legitimately occupying the property, that the landlord is let in by *them*, and not using his/her own keys.

4) Always have a contact number for your landlord or estate manager, preferably a mobile number, or if not, an official landline number, where your complaints can be properly logged.

5) Never try to tackle problems with the property yourself, you can only get into more trouble, and it can be seen as you trying to cover up for something that you did, as opposed to being a genuine problem which needs fixing.

6) Make sure you have a written agreement of the amount of rent you will be paying, and that you will be given at least a months notice in writing if this amount is to change in any way.

7) Try to make sure that, if you are sharing a rented property, the bills for utilities are in the
joint names of *all* the people in the house (you *can* do that now), so that the paying of the bills becomes *everyone’s* concern, and not just left up to one person to “collect” from the others. I have had bad experiences with this in the past, and people not paying up!

8) It’s sounds silly, but it’s probably better to sign up for a property where you have to pay a returnable bond beforehand, as this ensures that all the members of the house equally have something to lose by treating the property badly, and are therefore less likely to.

8a) Never pay your bond in cash, and *always* get a receipt!

9) If possible, the bond you pay should be directly related to individual non-payment of bills as well, that way, if “the guy from downstairs” clears off, and doesn’t pay his share of the bills, it will be take out of his share of the bond.

10) Lastly, when the landlord makes an inventory of your room (he/ she should do that whilst you are present), and of the house in general. Make sure you check every item thoroughly, and ensure they have noted any existing damage/ problems with furniture/décor, and that it is documented and check by you.


Good luck with future renting, and I hope I never have to live in a house like *that* ever again!

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