Macleod Lettings

Avoid at all costs if you can! Having gone through the entire letting process MacLeod were lovely, helpful and responsive when first processing my deposit and before I moved in, then…weren’t. They were unresponsive and untimely at best when contacting about various problems: - an electrical fire in the wall that was due to dodgy wiring. - shower that was out of use totalling a couple months due to the same dodgy wiring. - a suspected leaking boiler that cost a fortune in gas bill over a couple months and miraculously went back down to an expected and reasonable cost, the 3rd time I’d pushed for their own engineer to have a look again. (MacLeod actually said to me “heating costs go up at this time of year” when I first told of the issue!) You feel as if you are bothering them with anything and everything even though it was issues that was needing to be sorted. Upon leaving I received my deposit (in part) back, 7 month’s after I vacated the property! After a dispute in part due to their charging £450 for cleaning and £300 for “redecoration” of a two bedroom tenement flat. They offered to give me £26 back from my total deposit. If you do rent from them, be meticulous with filing all responses/non-responses as you will need to create an evidence folder when they try to create issues that don’t exist, to reap some deposit money from you when you leave. Take photos of everything. I ended up having to dispute via SafeDeposits Scotland and they waited until the day before every deadline to submit, causing it to drag out for the full 7 months. I ended up winning the dispute as it was clearly ridiculous, despite them submitting over 200 photos of anything and everything (like dust on a surface taken 3 weeks after I’d moved out). They also were caught being dishonest when I was able to present an email as evidence. Sneaky. Daniel also acted as the “property manager” and would be cheeky in correspondence back saying to only contact him when issues had been ignored and I’d copied in his colleagues. There’s no sense of professionalism, you can sense it’s a bitchy, one-upmanship environment and culture fostered. You get the impression that the dragging out the dispute until the last day etc. was intended as a deserved punishment for even disputing them in the first place. I was fortunate enough to be in the position that I wasn’t having to rely on the deposit money to use as a deposit for another place, which many people would and I think it’s a disgusting money-grabbing practice from an agency in general. They have a tag line “Trust. Transparency. Tenacity.” which I find a hilarious attempted at marketing nonsense.