Hidden Fees from a letting agent, are they legal?

Poco_money

Hi, I've been struggling to get back all of my deposit from my previous tenancy (shorthold assured tenancy agreement). They are claiming a £25 "check-out charge" which is not in the contract or in any other documents from them. They say every tenant leaving a property has this charge taken out of their deposit. When I left the property it was inspected and we received a signed notice that there was no damage to the property and that we should receive the full deposit back, but they later subtracted this admin charge.


I was not told of this charge when I (and my partner) signed the tenancy agreement. I told them that I had never heard of it before but they claim that all tenants receive a list of charges when taking out the tenancy. I did not receive this. They emailed a spreadsheet of costs, made on Excel with our names typed at the top, which said that we were obliged to pay £25 on checkout. However, this wasn't in the contract and I asked if they have any documentation mentioning this cost which we had signed (to prove we had seen it). They said no.


They are still holding the £25 and whenever I call them they treat me like I haven't rang before, "...it's just a standard charge". Can they legally do this? Can I take legal action?

Also, I dont think our deposit was protected with a deposit protection scheme. The contract claimed it would be held by a particular company but they have no record of the deposit and the office tell me the deposit is returned by the landlord making a bank transfer. They have also said that this £25 charge is up to him because "it's also his business" (he owns the agency). To get the deposit back we were told to go to a website called bondreturn(dot)co(dot)uk, but this redirects to a url specific for our agency. The password is just 'bondreturn' and you can see that it's not a website, just a form to complete. Is this legal? I have read that all agencies/landlords should use a DPS?


Finally, we paid a tenancy renewal fee after 6 months of being in the property in order to continue the tenancy for another 6 months, plus there was an admin fee when we took out the original contract. I thought these were normal, but the Shelter Scotland website said they're illegal. I'm in England so this might be different, but are these charges legal also?


Would we be able to get compensation in court for our deposit not being protected?


Thanks for any advice.

cooltt

If you've not signed anything with these charges on then you can take them to court. If you have proof they did not protect your deposit you can sue them for this as well.

Fill in an intention to prosecute in the county court form and give them a copy with a get out clause of giving your £25 check out fee back. If you want to you can still go ahead and sue them for not protecting the deposit after that. I've done it before it's very easy and they usually sit up and take notice.

RAS

Was this deposit ever protected properly in any of the official schemes (there are only three of which DPS is one)?

You need to check this, and should have done when you were still tenants.

G_M

1) check each scheme to see if the deposit was protected - only these 3 schemes can legally be used
2) stop calling them. WRITE. State that you have never signed a contract agreeing to the check out fee, not ever ssen it in their terms and conditions, therefore you expect your full deposit back within 5 working days. If your deposit is protected (1 above) say you will raise a dispute with the scheme. If your deposit is NOT protected, tell them that, ask them to explain why not, ad state you will start a Small Claims Court action.
3) the admin fee on renewing the tenany is legal in England so forget it

Poco_money

Thanks for the replies. I realise I should've checked the deposit before but I didn't even think of it, I've never had a problem with deposit protection before. In the contract it says the deposit is protected by the Tenancy Deposits Solutions scheme, with website mydeposits(dot)co(dot)uk. It says on the website they help you get your deposit back easily at the end of the tenancy. However, we have no login for this site and like I said in my first post, the website we were given actually redirects to their own url... which just seems to me like they're trying to disguise that they don't use any deposit scheme. My partner tried to access an account on the proper scheme website (mydeposits), filled in all the details such as dates of our tenancy, the website said it had no record of our property/tenancy.

At this point, I'm so fed up with poor treatment from them I'd quite like to take them to court, at least so someone can actually tell them to stop being such an underhand agency. I think it's shocking other tenants are just paying this £25 fee, I keep all my paperwork so I immediately knew it was wrong, I can only guess others just agree to it.

We left our tenancy at the start of June, this still isn't resolved because they don't call back when they say and keep pretending they haven't heard from me before.

I've been through the tenancy agreement and all other paperwork carefully several times, no fee is mentioned at all. I'm not even sure they're allowed to take fees out of it. It says in the contract the deposit is only to be used to compensate for damages - but there are no damages. Surely if there was a valid charge, I should have had my full deposit returned and then received a £25 bill?

Poco_money

Hi, thanks for the reply G_M. Sorry to give incorrect information, my partner tried using the mydeposits website and found no account. I just checked, trying a few variations and found we are protected by mydeposits. I think he might have not found it because the name registered was wrong, but the agency has had my surname wrong for our whole tenancy (I asked them many times to change it). So, we are protected, but they gave us no account info and asked us to use their own personal deposit request service to get it back, rather than the official service. Possibly so they can take off this £25 charge?

I'm going to ring the 0844 (:() number now to try to get account details.

G_M

Follow the dispute procedure with mydeposits, but write to the agent first.

RAS

And contact trading Standards as i think they lead on unfairs fees from a legal point of view. probably means the EA will just add it to their T&Cs in the future but at least people will know.

princeofpounds

If you do take this to the courts you need to be careful to understand the protection legislation. The legislation was messed up and it made it much more complicated and weaker in the courts than it was meant to be. So it's hard to get the 3x penalty now if the LL knows how to avoid it.

As a result it's often worth just asking for your money back and costs, otherwise you might end up on a potentially more expensive track in court.

flimsier

Are you sure the check-out charge wasn't on the contract. I've been done for £75 on one of these when leaving a place (they also wanted a cleaning fee, but after a 3 month stand-off relented) and it was in the contract. Page 16 if I remember. I'm sure the external check out person was just another one of their companies.

Poco_money

Ok, I have a few updates but first I'll respond to some extra questions. As for taking to court, I'm more concerned about getting my money back (even though it's only £25, it still should be returned to me!) and possibly compensation for having to chase this up. I'm not out to try to get the 3x money, if we were awarded that it'd be nice but that's all. I also want to expose this agency for being absolutely terrible to deal with.

I have been through this contract so many times, so has my partner. I just checked again and there's absolutely nothing in the contract (it also isn't 16 pages long ). There is a section on charges titled 'Rent & charges', this talks about charges for not paying rent but there is nothing about admin fees. Also in the contract there's a section on the deposit. It says "The balance of the Deposit to be paid to the Tenant as soon as reasonably possible after conclusion of the tenancy, less any reasonable costs incurred for the breach of any obligation as agreed by the appropriate deposit scheme, details of which are contained in the scheme's deposit information leaflet and website". We were given no deposit leaflet, but anyway, it says it will be returned in full less any costs from breaches. We had no breaches so surely that says we should have it back in full?

The deposit was for £500, but really, with this charge, they're basically taking a deposit of £475 and adding an extra £25 admin charge from the start, which isn't right in my opinion.

Updates:

1. We are NOT protected by My Deposits. My Deposits told me to email my tenancy agreement to them (scanned). I quickly received an email back telling me that although the website recognises we had deposit protection for the 1st 6 months, when we renewed our tenancy for a further 6 months they had to renew deposit protection for the new agreement, which they didn't do. Here's the email content:

"
Further to your recent email, I have checked our system and can confirm that there is unfortunately no deposit protection in place that matches the AST agreement provided to us.

Please be advised, the deposit protection with our scheme is only in place for the duration of the relating AST agreement. Therefore, once a new AST agreement has been signed a new protection would be required with our scheme. It appears that your landlord/agent has not reprotected your deposit in respect of the new AST agreement (that you provided to us)."


So, we aren't covered by deposit protection. I've emailed to ask if we can dispute regarding the original tenancy period or if that's invalid now due to renewing the tenancy.


I've done some reading and found out that most LAs should be registered with one of: ARLA, NALS, NAEA or The Property Ombudsman if they're respectable. Apparently this is a legal requirement for estate agents but not letting agents, but highly recommended. This agency is registered with none of these (I checked the website directories) so a website online suggested, as RAS said, to contact the Office of Fair Trading and Trading Standards and register a complaint.


I've written a long letter to notify the agency, as many of you said to do, but I wrote it expecting to be putting a complaint in to My Deposits. Seeing as we're not protected, but were previously, I'm not sure what to put in the letter instead. Should I say I will be starting Claims Court Action if I don't hear back within 5 days of the date of the letter?


Thank you for the help.