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Letting Agents and Estate Agents: Why Have They Got Such a Bad Name?

Sally Lawson of Concentric Lettings comments.

To research this article I googled 'I hate letting agents' and was met with pages of reasons why landlords and tenants hate letting agents, absolutely tons of posts, forums comments, even websites with all sorts of expletives and rants full of swear words and insults, far more content than I was expecting I must admit, and it saddens me.

I decided to write an article on this subject, as I am aware that NFOPP has recently looked into the popularity, or consumer 'perception' of estate agents and lettings agents, and the TPO (The Property Ombudsman's) report has just landed for 2012, which always makes interesting reading, and both tell a rather depressing story. It seems that I and my fellow agency colleagues are up there with the aliens out of the Predator movie as some of the most hated people in the country, so I wanted to explore why?

The TPO report refers to the level of complaints received and what they are about, and it seems that complaints (by members) about letting agents increased by 12% last year, but with an 11% increase in TPO membership. A majority of the complaints were about service (50%) and fees (12%). But there was a shocking increase in complaints for non-TPO members (up 41%), which is pretty scary.

The lettings industry is still unregulated, which means anyone can set up as a letting agent. We see this all the time; a person says they are a letting agent but they have no training, no management set up, the client money is in their personal account, there is no client money protection, tenancy agreements are downloaded off the internet, and they are only concerned with one thing; making money.

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