Accepted Guarantor & Referencing Not Enough?

notsure83

Hi people, this is my first post and I am very much in need of some advice on renting!

I am wondering if our Estate Agent and potential landlord are behaving unfairly and are allowed to accept then reject our offer on a house to rent if we don't pay a larger deposit than first agreed?

Basically my partner and I found a house we loved and put down a holding deposit marking the house as under offer. We agreed on monthly payments and negotiated their amount and as we are both self-employed we declared this fact during referencing. We failed the initial reference checks due to fluctuations in earnings (which we sort of expected) and so were asked to provide a Guarantor, which seemed perfectly reasonable.

Our guarantor was then referenced and we were told yesterday that his referencing had been passed and that our offer had been accepted - just the contract still needed to be signed at our earliest convenience and we could arrange to move in shortly. Monthly rental amounts and tenancy period had both been agreed via email and phone calls.

Today our estate agent got in touch to say that the landlord is uneasy about renting to us after all as we are self employed (which was fine yesterday). Estate agent would like us to change to quarterly rent payments instead of monthly or else a deposit double the size of that initially agreed... we can't afford either of these options, just the initially agreed deposit amount and monthly rent.

My question is whether we have any grounds to insist on having the house (pre-signed contract) if our offer was accepted together with an approved guarantor - or can any amount of changes be made by LL/EA until a contract is signed?

Thanks for any help.

N