Dear Mr Dinnis,

Thank you for taking the time to review our service on allagents.

I would firstly like to address your comment that we do not have the necessary skills to manage our properties. Wilkinson Byrne’s ethos is and always has been centered around exceptional customer service and organisation. We would invite you to read some of the other reviews on this website as the general consensus amongst our landlords and tenants is that the Management team are more than capable of managing properties and delivering the correct levels of service and professionalism.

As you correctly claim, neither the landlady nor ourselves had a copy of the keys for the property. Therefore we would have had to rely on you to supply us with the key to get it cut. We would have taken this expense on ourselves and had major difficulties in getting you to compromise on this matter. The flat was occupied by yourself for 2 ½ years and we feel in that period of time, there would have been a chance for us to resolve this matter with minimal disruption to all parties. You state that you gave us an opportunity to collect the keys from your work, however if I remember correctly you were actually working in another part of the country at the time. I feel most people would find a 4 hour round trip would be a huge inconvenience and would leave us at risk of neglecting our other properties for almost a full working day. The ‘ample opportunities’ you claim to have provided us were uncompromising and always on your terms.

You mentioned in your review that your one regret is that you did not read your tenancy agreement thoroughly enough; firstly, our tenancy agreements are standard Assured Shorthold Tenancy agreements and therefore the tenants’ obligations are the standard obligations you would find with any contract/agency. I feel I must draw attention to the fact that your tenancy agreement states you are obligated to allow entry for viewings should this be necessary, once the correct Notice period has been given to you. The same applies to engineers, Agent representatives wishing to carry out quarterly inspections, and perhaps most importantly, Gas Safety visits. We have on file the last 3 years recorded Gas Safety Certificates and so this would actually dispel your claim that you were renting a property without the necessary legal paperwork. This is an accusation we take very seriously, and we would be willing to provide evidence to the appropriate organisations in order to set the record straight on this particular matter.

We have numerous third party contractors that can also confirm, if need be, that appointments were arranged with yourself in order to get both small and large maintenance issues resolved at your request; on more than one occasion these appointments were not kept by yourself. This caused a lot of inconvenience and expense to these individuals, and we have never exercised our contractual right to charge you for these abortive appointments.

As you will recall, your consistent detailed emails to the landlady informing her that works had not been completed were totally unjustified; you will remember, Mr Dinnis, that you apologised in writing after you realised that the landlady had copied us in on one of your emails expressing her concern as to why works had not been carried out on the thermostat. In actual fact, the works had been completed and you admitted you did not realise you needed to flip the switch to turn it back on. Therefore this particular situation is irrelevant as both ourselves and the landlady HAD fulfilled our contractual obligations promptly.

We agree that correspondence between ourselves and our clients should always be in writing, and we actively encourage this.

Lastly, your comments advising future tenants to withhold rent is totally unacceptable and irresponsible, as this would have great implications on our landlords and tenants alike, and would place people in direct breach of their contract.

We are of course very disappointed that you have felt the need to communicate your frustrations in this manner, however please rest assured that we do value all feedback on this website.