Women's Views on News |
| Challenge to non-refundable letting fees Posted: 04 Nov 2015 01:15 AM PST
By Summer Dean. I have lived and rented in Brighton for four years; three as a student and one as a graduate, and have become increasingly shocked over the years by the cost of non-refundable fees that letting agents charge tenants in the city. In reality, this is not a problem unique to Brighton and Hove. Tenants across the country are being stung with extortionate, and often hidden, fees that must be paid upfront before they can even start thinking about getting money together for a deposit and rent. That's why Home Sweet Home have launched our next campaign: Stick It Up. We're calling on letting agents to be transparent about their fees and play their part in the schemes that exist to protect tenants which agents are required to be a part of by law. Our aim here is pretty simple: to get 100 per cent of Brighton and Hove's letting agents to comply with the Consumer Rights Act 2015. It's not a big ask – after all, it's the law – but following our action on Saturday 24th October we were genuinely surprised by how many letting agents aren't being transparent and are breaking the law. We took to the streets to visit a total of 67 letting agents. In line with the Consumer Rights Act, we were checking to see if information on fees, deposit protection and redress schemes' were indeed displayed prominently on the letting agent premises. We did not expect that all agents would be 100 per cent compliant with the law, but I don't think anything could have prepared us for how bad it really was. We found one letting agent who would be willing for their tenants to depart with over £500 in non-refundable fees. Others were advertising their fees without VAT and one, after boasting that their fees 'are the cheapest in town' wanted to charge tenants an additional £50 for their deposit to be put in a deposit protection scheme, despite this being a legal requirement for the letting agent to do. Of the 67 letting agents visited, only 12 of them were fully compliant. Twelve. That is just 17.9 per cent. More shocking perhaps was that despite it being the law, many letting agents could not give us the information we were seeking at all. An answer of 'I don't know' was far more common than we could have imagined. As with our previous Tenants: Know Your Rights campaign, one of our central aims is to increase knowledge of tenants' rights; in this case, the right to be aware of any fees before signing a contract, the right to know which scheme the letting agent will register their deposit with and also the right to know which redress scheme the letting agent is a part of in the case that anything goes wrong during the tenancy. With results like this, it can mean only one thing: more action. We will be serving notice to the letting agents who are not complying with the law. We'll be presenting them with the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and giving them some handy templates into which they can insert the information legally required and display prominently on the wall. We'll also let the letting agents (all 82 per cent of them) know who the small minority of letting agents are who are fully compliant. This will give us good ground to be able to make a case for council action on letting agents in Brighton and Hove. Brighton and Hove Council says that the amount of private rented properties in Brighton and Hove is 21 per cent, twice as high as the national average. The chances are that issues that tenants face across the city could affect you too. Want to get involved with Home Sweet Home, hear more, or have a story to tell? Follow the campaign on Twitter @HSHBrighton or email us. A version of this article appeared on Movement for Change’s website.  |
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