Aberdeen Property Leasing

Firstly i'd like to say you are all far to kind voting that they are 11559 out of 11623 in the UK. If you ever take advice from anyone in your entire life let it be this; DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES RENT FROM APL. They provided the most horrendous living experience of my life in the year I lived in their property. I would never lower my self to use them again -even if you're strapped for time or money or whatever- JUST KEEP LOOKING!!! -When I first moved in the flat it was dirty, cold and damp. There was also a TON of stuff in the flat occupying all cupboards and storage space clearly left over from a string of previous tenants however I needed a place to stay quickly as my course was starting the next week. -The standard of the facilities were less than liveable -the oven was held together by tape, the heaters barely worked, the shower was but a sprinkle on my head and the skirting and the floorboards never met due to some really shoddy work. -The flat was heated by 4 electric heaters which sucked up my money for absolutely nothing as it would take them HOURS to heat up a room! And then it would stop working for a few days for no reason what so ever. The heater in the bedroom I couldn't even switch on because it smelled like it was going to burst into flames. After complaining I was told they would not do anything about it. -I also informed APL that when conducting inspections etc they should come after 12:00pm as I worked nights but on many occasions they barged in on me and my girlfriend sleeping with no prior warning beforehand through email or text. -One of the times they actually did contact me prior to a visit I advised them not to lock the bottom lock when leaving as it was broken (another thing they refused to fix) and I did not have a key for it. So when I returned from Uni on that very, very cold snowy winter's night to find that the agent from APL had locked the bottom lock to leave me without a bed for the night I was FUMING. I emailed them informing them of my situation and demanded they send someone to open the door. After an hour sitting in my hallway i decided to go to my place of work (30 minute walk from my flat in the snow) to get a hot drink and contemplate my options. Approximately 2 hours after sending the email someone replied saying and I quote 'Someone will be along in the next hour to open the door as his wife is getting a haircut just now.' After walking in the snow for an hour and a half that day I was finally let into my flat where the heating didn't work. -When cleaning the flat one day I moved the chest of drawers in the spare room out from the wall to find that the back of the drawers were completely covered in a layer of fur. The drawers, the contents and the wall behind were completely destroyed by mould. After calling APL they said just to bin the chest of drawers and they would replace them (this was 3 months before I moved out and the drawers were never replaced). Mould is extremely unhealthy to live in and myself and my partner were ALWAYS unwell while I lived there, coincidentally. No matter how many times I cleaned the wall the mould would always come back. -Expanding on what I meant by 'ALWAYS unwell' - I woke up with a really large lump on my neck one morning and as it turned out my gland was very swollen due to infection. Despite numerous trips to the doctors and antibiotics it would not go away completely -this in my opinion was because I was still living in the mouldy flat that caused my illness. Myself and my girlfriend (who would frequent my flat and stay over) were more often than not, coughing and snivelling. After staying with me for a week my girlfriend then became very, very sick and had to stay home from work and college for 3 weeks!! After we decided to stay at her place for a while, she became well again. I asked my doctor if there was any way we could prove that it was the mould that made us sick but she said 'unfortunately, no' otherwise we would have pursued legal advice. -Finally when I was blessed enough to find myself at the end of the lease I found a nice flat owed by a private landlord. This was when I was emailed a bill for all the cleaning that had to be done to the flat that would come out of my £675.00 deposit. I was TOTALLY RIPPED OFF. I cleaned and scrubbed and bleached every inch of the flat -leaving it in MUCH better condition than I had found it. Just to scrape the surface I was charged £20 for a missing bin in the livingroom and then later in the bill charged £20 for the removal of an extra bin in the kitchen. Anybody could work out that during the year I had lived there the bin was moved into another room. The list of ridiculous charges went on and on and on... Including £20 to remove a piece of blu tac that was supposedly 'left on the wall'. In the end I received £400.00 back from APL. I desperately want to know, if i went and chapped on the door and asked the new tenants how they found the place, weither they would feel it looked like it had been cleaned £275.00 worth. I'd be willing to bet that the tenants before myself were charged a FORTUNE for cleaning that wasn't carried out. In conclusion, APL are the WORST letting agents i've ever been with and are the most hopeless, incompetent, unsafe, money thieving people i've ever had the displeasure of dealing with.