This is copy pasted from my facebook status so please keep this in mind with the tone it is written: Not had a rant for some time but let's dive into why Nobody in the Preston area should ever consider Kingswood letting agents when moving house/flat. I now feel more comfortable being public about what's happened because we're with a different agent and no longer have to fear Kingswood. Me and Pete recently moved out of a flat let by them in Centenary Mill (to another flat in Centenary Mill btw) and it couldn't have been more of a hellhole and the agents couldn't have been worse without legitimately shitting on our carpets and smearing it across the wall using our rent money as a paintbrush. For a small amount of context before i go into the problems we've had I just want to say that on our viewings of the flat it looked perfectly fine apart from the questionable colour scheme the living room was painted in. From mid October we had no Hot water because the wiring in the switches for the boiler were actually fucked, we complained multiple times, all to be ignored. Since then me and Pete have had to run cold shallow baths and heat them up by boiling the kettle repeatedly, making it about an hour and half getting ready in the morning each before we could do anything. Meanwhile in the Shower room we haven't touched since we moved in because... well neither of us were going to have an ice cold shower... there's Grey sludge overflowing and settling in the bottom of the cubicle, we rinsed it out a few times, but once we realised it was happening nearly every day we just gave up and never went into the shower room again until we moved out. Sometime around then we also discovered when trying to paint over the abysmal techno coloured living room that the wiring for the lights in there were BLACK underneath the lighting covers, completely unsafe, absolutely dangerous and should have been an immediate fix by housing standards. They ignored again multiple requests to fix this. A few weeks into complaints and we found out that our request logs had all been deleted by Kingswood's repair system along with many other of their tenants and we hadn't been notified until we pressed them why nothing was getting done. Move forward to beginning of December when nothing has been done still, and another problem occurs, the washing machine has flooded after a wash and seeped into the flat below, again we complain about this. Only when the owner of the flat below complains to Kingswood about the seeping water damage do they send over someone to fix the pipe, only the moron they sent looked for 2 minutes, changed a pipe in the washing machine and said it was fine now, despite both Pete and the Owner of the flat below telling him it was a mains sewage pipe that was flooding. Low and Behold we run the washing machine, and again there's a flood, only this time, the pipe's burst even worse so there's a huge flood in the bedroom on the other side of the kitchen where the machine and mains pipe is. So for the next few weeks (because we can't not wash our dishes) we have sewage and water sitting in the carpets and floorboards of a whole room. Now the pipe gets fixed at the start of January, but NOT by Kingswood, no it's fixed by the Lovely Urban Bubble Team who do the maintenance for the communal areas of Centenary Mill, because the flooding was obviously going to affect the building and other tenants. Just Before Christmas we thought we had a breakthrough as we'd forced them to contact their main office and our Landlord through threatening with housing standards. Our Landlord and a Higher up from Main office come check out the problems in person, and promise fast repairs. We never heard from the higher up again. Flash Foward to near the end of January, at this point we've got the power of Mark Walsh Estates (our actual saviours in this story) behind us who owned the water damaged flat below us, and housing standards, and the council. Mark Walsh estates offers us a recently refurbished flat in the mill as long as we can get out of our contract. Kingswood, despite all the problems they've saddled with us and not fixed, Refuse to let us out of the contract. Mark Walsh Estates managed to directly get in touch with our Landlord to charge him for the damage done to the flat below, the Landlord after much talking and explaining the many problems, finally realises that Kingswood are a useless bunch of twats and agrees to try and terminate the contract on his side too. We finally get out of the contract 2 weeks before housing standards would have taken Kingswood to court. Now to explain, me and Pete did want to take them to court, however we were so desperate to get out of that flat we didn't want to pay February's rent just to get to the threshold to warrant legal action, nor did we really want to have our Landlord caught up in the mess, because as it turned out he was kept in the dark by Kingswood through most of this mess and was only told bare minimum, he was actually quite nice, and as we were moving out he offered to pay our admin fees for moving out, he would have offered more but the amount he earned from letting out the flat after Kingswood took their cut was very little. Now today we're happily moved into a new flat with hot water, working lights and no weird sewage leaks! That's not the end though... ohhhh no. Kingswood had the audacity today to contact us to try and charge us maintenance fees for the old flat. Now some of them I understood, like there was some paint marks on the floor from our attempt to cover the techno walls and we had one day to move out so we couldn't fully clean everything spotless which I would understand. However some things they want to charge us for are they're problem not ours. They want to charge us for: -Fire door latches (they were taken off when we moved in and I hadn't mentioned it earlier but we did ask for them to be put back on) -Stains on the Kitchen wall (there when we moved in, they're pictured on our move in inventory) - Tape on the skirting boards (same as the stains, there when we moved in and pictured on our move in inventory) So Quite rightly we're pissed off again as after everything they put us through they would like us to pay them more money to fix a hellhole they made us live in for months. Absolutely no sympathy, no apologies, nothing. They've been arseholes since the start and I fully recommend anyone to avoid them like the damn plague. I know for a fact the agent that dealt with our case has been fired as well as when trying to contact him we were told he no longer worked for them.