Blackwells

At first, everything seemed to be great. Looking around the property was promising and the agency was very easy to deal with. Moving in was the first sign of trouble. The house was a complete state upon moving in. They had just recently had painters and decorators in, who had left all their own stuff and rubbish in the whole home. There wasn't a room without it! The kitchen was a state, even inside the cupboards! Blackwells claims to have sent in professional cleaners but that definitely wasn't the case when we moved in. They offered to send out a cleaner, which we accepted, only to have the cleaner cancel on us five minutes before turning up (after the letting agency called for the night). After two days of trying to sort something out, we had to take compensation to clean it ourselves. We did it to the standard that we were happy with and left it in a better standard than that when moving out but Blackwells still tried to take money out of our deposit for cleaning. Luckily the deposit scheme sided in our favour. There were problems with fixing items in the house. The bathroom door broken at 11pm on a Saturday night and we had no emergency number. My husband had to break the door down (he was trapped in the room) and we reported it as soon as the letting agency opened. That was in the December time and it took until after we moved out for them to fix it! Also, high winds damaged the tiles on the roof with a hole big enough for a blackbird to get stuck in the attic for half a day! We reported that in the November and it wasn't fixed by the time we moved out in the August of the next year! They had the audacity to tell us that tiles come off and they had to get the best time of year to fix it--that would have been during the heatwave in the May of 2012 then, not after August when the weather was starting to close in! Moving out was a pain and we were charged for extra days. The first day was admittedly our fault but the second one was theirs. Their checkout guy was double booked and couldn't make it to do ours until the next day. Blackwells refused to take any responsibility for that. It then took five months to get the majority of the deposit back. We were emailing and calling on a consistent basis to find out when the deposit would be paid after moving out in August 2012. It was November 2012 that they stated the money was going to be placed into a scheme and we would have to go through that--after a period of 20 days--to get the money back. That money, by law, should have been moved in by the October since it was July when the Scottish law came into affect. They took no responsibility for that delay. I've had issues with one letting agency before this but nothing as bad as this one. Avoid with a passion. The warning sign should have been when the company has no official website of their own!