Reiver Property Management

First of all, in the interests of full disclosure, I own and run a property management company in Northamptonshire. This does not mean that I know absolutely everything about residential lettings, but it does mean that I have a fair idea of what I am talking about and the level of service that a landlord should expect. I would also consider myself to be a “good” landlord – I’m easy to contact, I never argue, quibble over or delay any necessary maintenance/repairs and I always want to keep my tenants happy. Reiver Property Management looked after three properties for me in Galashiels and did so for several years, up until very recently. I live over 300 miles away, so it is important to me that I have a local letting agent handling them. Reiver is run by a man named Ronnie Shearer – it seems that a very long time ago, somebody stole the jam out of his doughnut and he has never quite got over it. Ronnie is an abrasive character who strikes me as quite capable of starting a fight in an empty room – a polite, short and simple query along the lines of “how are you getting on with the marketing of my property, I haven’t heard anything from you in a couple of weeks?” was met by an angry response several paragraphs long, in which he accused me of doubting his professionalism and ability to do his job, culminating with the statement that if I wasn’t happy, then he would send me my keys back. Quite where this rage originates from, I do not know – his default character setting is “grumpy”, but it takes very little (or even nothing) to provoke him into becoming outright hostile. Customer Service and communication are clearly not areas where Ronnie’s talents lie and given his attitude towards his clients, I am astounded that he has managed to trade as long as he has. Other staff have come and gone over the years – they have always seemed pleasant enough, but if you are a landlord and expecting regular updates as to the marketing of your property or repairs or any other ongoing situation, forget it. If you send them an email that they don’t want to answer, then they just won’t. You will find that quite often phone calls go to voicemail as well and it is hit and miss as to whether they feel like returning them. Rent collection is also not one of their strong points – it took me asking “where is my rent for this month?” after a three week delay for them to investigate and to discover that a tenant had not paid. They vacated soon after and no effort was made to recover the monies owed. Not ideal for a business that is supposed to be managing and taking care of a landlord’s investment – in addition, I do not believe that regular, routine inspections were ever carried out (most agents would do this every three months or so, either in person or by video call, and I never received any reports or feedback relating to them) and maintenance issues often took a long time to resolve or are ignored. As an example, a tenant reported a damp patch appearing on a ceiling – a roofer was supposed to attend and quote for the repairs, several months later this still had not happened. Reiver’s referencing procedure is also hugely questionable – in June this year, they informed me that they had re-let a vacant property to a young lady and were hoping to move her in the following week. I requested copies of the applicant’s bank statements and was horrified to see that they were hugely overdrawn (salary barely clearing the overdraft each month) – the applicant was living at home and not paying rent, so how she was expected to find an additional £550 or so to cover rent, utilities and Council Tax plus maintain her current lifestyle, I do not know. There was absolutely no way that she could have afforded this, yet Reiver would have been content to move her in had I not vetoed it. Checking a tenant’s bank statements is a basic and fundamental part of the referencing procedure, so I have no idea how they could have overlooked this – maybe they just didn’t care who they put in, so long as they could charge me a re-let fee for doing so? The final straw with Ronnie was when I decided to put my properties up for sale – the intention had only ever been to sell the properties as a going concern, with the tenants in situ, as obviously no landlord wants a lengthy void period. One was about to become occupied by a new tenant who was aware of this and I called the office to discuss the sale of the other two occupied flats and spoke to a woman named Wendy, who seemed pleasant enough but evidently only listened to one word out of every four. During that conversation, I asked about notice periods as should the existing tenants decide not to cooperate with this – and there could be no reason for them not to, as the only difference to them would be a different landlord’s name on their tenancy agreement, so it was purely hypothetical and very unlikely that the situation would arise – then I would need to serve them with notice and then sell the properties with vacant possession. You would think this would seem reasonable enough, wouldn’t you? No, it seems that it wasn’t. The following day, I was most surprised to receive an email from Ronnie giving two months’ notice that he was terminating his management contract with me and would be posting me all keys and paperwork, as apparently I wanted to kick all of my tenants out as soon as possible (!!!), including the one who was due to move in imminently. Somewhat surprised by this, I emailed back to say he was evidently more confused than usual, I had said no such thing and that I genuinely had no idea where he got that idea from. I then spoke to the selling agent, they contacted Ronnie who then allegedly informed them that I had apparently said something along the lines of if they didn’t cooperate then I wanted them dragged out and the locks changed – this is actually bordering on slander and so, as you can imagine, I was seriously unimpressed. Management was then transferred to another agent, but the whole process was a lengthy, unnecessary and totally avoidable headache, although I am delighted that I no longer have to deal with him. In over twenty years of working in residential property, I have never come across such an aggressive, unpredictable, ill-tempered and unreasonable property “professional” as Ronnie Shearer and I would encourage landlords who value their properties or who hope to enjoy any decent level of service to stay well away from both him and his business.