Unfortunately, William H Brown in Brentwood have been appalling right from the start of our tenancy. To begin with, their listing stated that a golf membership came with the property we were renting. We thought that was strange but thought it was a nice addition. Once we enquired about that, our landlord informed us that it didn’t come with the rental - not a problem us, but was confused as to why they’d write that in the listing. William H Brown then deleted said listing and denied all knowledge - which in hindsight, should’ve been the first red flag warning with the storm we had to come. Next, they were not responsive with the questions we had regarding the tenancy, yet they were very quick to chase our money the deposit. They also had the wrong telephone number me, of which I informed them, and they told me that it ‘didn’t matter’. Later on towards at end of the tenancy, it was a battle to get our deposit back. We had moved out and asked regarding our deposit. It should have been released in 10 days according to the tenancy deposit scheme, however they only refunded us after 5 and a half weeks and after I was forced to launch a formal complaint. Not only that, but we were lied to several times by agents, who claimed they would chase the landlord to release the funds. However, I caught them out on the lie, as they told me they ‘were in contact with the landlord to sell another property he had’. I therefore questioned why was it they could be in contact with the landlord to sell his property, yet very conveniently ‘couldn’t get hold of him’ when asking our deposit. My view is they never even tried and just lied to us, which is very clear. It was only when I had to kick up a fuss was I given the contact number of the housing people that were holding the funds. I was met with a very confrontational and rude woman, who refused to help, citing that the person dealing with the was ‘on annual leave’. Annual leave 6 weeks? I think not. I was then told the manager would get in contact with me ‘at some point during the day’. This is not good enough and terrible service. But when they did ‘get in contact’ they had called my boss. Now, I was asked a reference, in which I put her down. They had clearly put the details wrong in the system and had her phone number down as mine (note how earlier I flagged that the phone number was incorrect at the start of the tenancy during contract stage). The woman then proceeded to give out personal and financial information relating to myself and my partner to my boss. Thankfully, I still work there and we have a good working relationship. However i dread to think what could have been example, she didn’t already know what was going on, or I had left the company on bad terms. This is a major GDPR breach. When I placed the formal complaint I was told it ‘would not be logged as formal’. When questioning that relating to the lies we were told as well as the GDPR breach, only then was it flagged as formal. To my shock, I discover on LinkedIn that the person looking into it was very good friends with one of those agents I complained about. This company plays very loose with the rules and do not care about customers at all. Save yourself aggro and do not use them. I am now in the process of taking this further to trading standards as the way we have been treated is absolutely abhorrent. Unfortunately we will never use William H Brown again.