Estate Agency Contract Renewal Fees

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Hi,

I presume this is the right forum for house related queries.

I'm a private tenant wondering if the 50 pounds contract renewal fee is completely legit. It seems to me a matter of erasing the dates from our last tenancy agreement, photocopying an identical document and giving it to us to sign.

So I'm wondering how to negotiate the fee down. Has anybody had any experience of doing this? I feel it's a bit of a rip off. And something I can ill afford.

http://money.guardian.co.uk/renting/story/0,14360,1217095,00.html

Where it says:

Below we list some of the additional fees agents now demand. However you are under no legal obligation to pay them and they can all be negotiated down - ideally to zero.

But I've been unable to uncover anything about the legality of these fees.

I'm a little exasperated with our estate agents. They take ages to fix anything and only do so when we begin threatening action. We have an ongoing dispute about the fire in the front room for instance which had to be switched off due to it emitting CO2, but because we have central heating, the agency says that we should use that. I feel it's a safety risk irrespective of whether we have central heating or not. Not to mention that we often we only want to heat up one room and not the whole house - thereby saving money.

But that's another issue .... it's just a bit typical of their attitude, which is why I want to make sure I (hopefully) have a case with the contract renewal fees before complaining and getting nowhere.