Having agreed a deal to rent this property for a year we were concerned that this estate agent was not taking up our references and the property was still being marketed. After a few weeks we were informed (by email) that the property had been let to someone else. We then realised, probably because we had negotiated hard, that we had been used as a 'reserve' tenant. The landlady, a Ms. Sophie Jane Tompkins, and the estate agent had clearly been looking for a better deal and when that materialised we were dropped. This has been a learning experience for us, perhaps this is not unusual in the rental market but it drives the wrong behaviours and is unethical.