Enfields Lettings

Students Stay Away. If I could give less than 1 star I would. Myself and my 4 other housemates went with enfields this year, to find a student house for our second year of university. over the 11 month period, we were treated as idiots, with all sorts of "necessary costs and fees" which simply do not exist in the real world e.g. "exit fee of £210 per tenant", "administration fee of £400 per tenant", the list goes on. Our house was old, had its problems - problems that would have taken less than a days work to fix had they been bothered to contact the landlord (who we never met or ever heard from ourselves) and get them sorted. Our boiler (which looks like a relic off the titanic), didn't work properly from day 1, meaning we had insufficient heating over the winter, and no hot water throughout our entire tenancy. We emailed, phoned, even went to the agency in person, multiple times and they never did anything at all. The first ground floor bedroom had severe rising damp from before our tenancy started, and we were assured that it would be fixed before we moved in. This was never fixed and continued to get increasingly worse, as DRIPPING WATER was accumulating around the 2 plug sockets in the bedroom. A combination of which we are taught to be deadly from a very early age. Ground floor bedroom number 2, had an infestation of slugs which got into the tenant's clothes, shoes and carpet, and again Enfields did nothing about the issue. Upstairs first bedroom had damp and mould; they told the tenant to simply "wipe the mould off the wall with a wet-wipe", which then put more damp into the wall and caused more of an issue, not to mention the fact that it created a black, smeary mess on the wall which we will probably now get penalised for in our deposit. Upstairs second bedroom had more mould on both the ceiling and the wall behind the tenants pillows, so she was sleeping in front of this mould the whole time - surprise, surprise Enfields chose to ignore the numerous emails the tenant had sent to them with photos of the issue. Saving the best to last, the upstairs third bedroom was so poorly ventilated, that thick layers of toxic black mould were accumulating on all four walls of the room, into the wardrobe and surrounding the bed. This resulted in a decline in health for the tenant, who ended up not being able to stay in the room any longer, due to rashes and poor breathing taking over as a result. The landlord apparently promised a rent reduction of 50% to her, however this took nearly 2 months to be put into place. She also had to throw away the majority of her clothes and shoes in the wardrobe because they were so damaged from the mould and damp in the room. She had contacted Enfields countless times, phoned them, had her parents phone them, and every time Lisa would be conveniently "out of office". Every now and then we would have builders show up (usually unannounced) to "fix" the damp in the bedrooms, however their idea of fixing the damp and mould was to literally just paint over it. Later on they told us to keep the heating on as much as possible so as to dry out the damp, and we expressed our concerns over costing of the excess gas usage (to which Enfields had promised us the Landlord would reimburse us for), and the fact that the boiler and thermostat didn't work, as a result, Enfields did nothing and the problems worsened. To add insult to injury, the washing machine then broke, it took Enfields a week just to reply to our initial email about the issue and then another nearly 2 weeks for them to send someone to replace it. Except they couldn't fit it for some sort of plumbing issue, so then we had to wait even longer for it to get fitted. As of the final day of the tenancy the old machine was still sat in the utility room and we were never told what to do with it, and no one ever came to take it away. As the tenancy went on we heard less and less from Enfields in regard to our issues with the house. Our shower stopped working due to an electrical fault, and we were left for over a week with no shower, we all emailed several times but it didn't make them feel the sense of urgency at all, for more context, we are all archaeology students, in the field getting muddy. A shower is fairly crucial for us, as it is for everyone. The thermostat for the boiler was hanging off the wall from day 1, so even if the boiler was miraculously working we could never get the heating to be higher than 17 degrees. The living room light was unusable for over 2 months, because it was haphazardly hanging out of the ceiling with wires exposed, so when the bulb blew we couldn't change it, this problem wasn't fixed until the week before everyone moved out. We had 2 smoke detectors in the entire house, one in the hallway by the front door, 2 rooms away from the kitchen, and one on the upstairs landing. Upon a council inspection at the beginning of MARCH 2019, who were appalled by the lack of fire door and smoke detectors, we were told that there would be 3 additional smoke detectors put in as soon as possible. These smoke detectors were installed a week before we moved out, in the last week of July. All of this on top of endless agents turning up with hopeful-looking future tenants, but they never gave us any advance notice for this at all (it is contracted that we are to have AT LEAST 24 hours notice before a viewing or inspection) so we told them they had to go. Mostly in hope that it would give the new tenants an insight into what they were potentially getting themselves into; an unreliable, disrespectful, unprofessional and inadequate agency, to go hand-in-hand with an overall stressful, disappointing and miserable tenancy. I am unaware of how the agency treat "normal" tenants (non-students), but it seemed to us that they were completely taking advantage of the assumed naivety of us as students. I strongly recommend for anyone looking to rent or buy a property, to do it with literally ANYONE but Enfields. We have nothing positive to express about Enfields at all, and I hope for the new tenants (who are being charged an extra £20/month in rent for a house that hasn't been improved at all) that they make sure to stand up to them, and pester them with all issues, because they really won't care at all and good luck getting anything from them.