Reeds Rains Property Managers! bah! (Reeds Rains)

Member Name: lorriellah

Product:	Reeds Rains
Date:	05/10/06 (468 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: None

Disadvantages: Many

Reeds Rains.
I am a tenant with Reeds Rains and unfortunately the house I'm looking at buying is also being sold by Reeds rains so now I'm feeling a little apprehensive as so far this national company has been nothing but a farsce.
The property I'm renting has had it's fault, and I'll be honest, the shower was fixed within 2 months and the back door was able to be used within 3 so they actually achieved something...
The latest problem is actually a very serious one which is effecting my partners health yet for some reason we keep getting passed from pillar to post. A month ago my partner went up into the loft which, i will add, we are allowed to access, and as he stepped on the ladder and got half way up the hatch and bracket fell off around him and by some miracle he was able to stay on the ladder and not fall down the stairs and avoided the hatch smacking him on the head. He was lucky, coming away with just a sprained ankle.
We then looked at each other, unsure of what to do- we were faced with a gaping hole in the ceiling and a great wooden bracket tangled up around the ladder blocking our access to our second bedroom. The first thought was to phone Reeds Rains and report the fault right away so that the problem could be amended, however, it was 9pm and our ‘welcome pack’ didn’t contain an emergency out of hours number. My partner and I had to untangle the mess between us, managing to put the ladder back up and go to bed leaving a huge hole in the ceiling which spat out lots of dust and cold air.
After a very unrestful night due to the dust effecting my partner’s asthma my partner phoned the property managers AKA Reeds Rains to inform them of the incident. The usual response was “We will have to get in touch with the landlord…” and so we waited… by the end of the week we still hadn’t heard back and we were both fed up of the effect it was having on his asthma and so we rang them back. The response was fairly normal as the past few problems (the fact the backdoor wouldn’t open or the shower turn off…) had been dealt with in a similar way: “The landlord lives in Newzealand so it’s hard to get hold of him.” Surely, if you own a property abroad you have a manager in this country who will deal with problems? Anyway, about a week later after we had rang Reeds Rains a good two/three times we heard that the landlord was saying it was evidently our fault therefore our responsibility to fix.
If I had been swinging from the hatch, prizing open the seal or going round the edge of it with a chisel then yes, I would accept full responsibility and wouldn’t mind taking a whole day off work whilst someone fixes it, however, all that we did was open the loft. It is either bad maintence or just poor building work therefore the responsibility of the owner. Tennants are responsible for their deliberate mistakes…
My partner made it clear that it wasn’t our responsibility and that we would not be fixing it and they would have to get this message across to the owner. Still very angry that we had not got any further we decided to put our anger down in writing and so we wrote a letter complaining about the way in which the problem was being managed.
10 days past and we’d heard nothing and by this time it was October and so the hole in the ceiling was causing the house to be very cold and my partner had gone a month having to use his inhaler every single day whereas before it was usually only one every few months he’d need it. This leads us up until the present day. I woke up this morning frustrated that we can’t keep the house warm, my partner can’t breathe and we can’t access our belongings in the loft. I rang Reeds Rains to find out what was going on.
They told me that the problem had apparently been sorted! That my partner had agreed that it was ‘our responsibility’ and that we would sort it, I wonder, if this was the case then why would we have sent a letter clearly stating how angry we were? I asked them how it could possibly be something we could have caused, made it clear that there was no way my partner would have said that and the fact that they hadn’t even acknowledged the letter was just disgraceful.
I think the thing that irritates me the most is the distinct lack of contact, the problem was logged weeks ago and it has been my partner and I doing the chasing and if I wouldn’t have called today they would have just ignored the letter and followed the assumption that we were sorting it ourselves although where they dreamt that from I do not know.
The position we are in again is that they are contacting the landlords so yet again we have to wait and who knows if they’ll even ring us back.

Summary: Bad communication leading to a potential health-hazard for us tennants.