Richard Sandground in Selly Oak

Poshpads we’re terrible, the landlord Richard Sandgroung was only bothered about his rent been on time and not fixing the issues with the house. One instance was the mould in the house. He suggested that wiping it down gc would solve the issue but no. It kept coming back due to issues with the houses leaking and guttering been blocked. The moisture levels in the wall are very bad.
Overall Richard is there to take advantage of students.

Richard sandground is the worst person I have ever come across. He tries to rip students off at every possible moment and he speaks to people like they are beneath him. He took ages to give back our deposit and took loads away for no reason. He said he was dying which is why he was awful at responding to emails - a strategy I have heard he has used before. He owns a lot of properties so I have to question why he has to be such a stingy, despicable old man. You will not be allowed to have friends round, forget parties/pres. Richard is a gangster, if you have any issues he will threaten you on the phone. Please don’t go with posh pads selly oak. Richard has

Richard is profit oriented for himself. He would call at all hours of the day or night. Once on a Friday evening at 9pm to accuse myself of ‘stealing’ from him he had me panicking on the phone for an hour as he said no money for four months worth of rent were in his account, it turns out he was spelling my name wrong, I got no apology. During the pandemic Richard made £3948 on this property alone and refused for any kind of help for one of the tenants in a financial hardship, although he’d happily call us from Hong Kong and on other occasions to complain he felt unwell, an attempt to get us to stop pestering about issues with the house that he allowed to be unresolved or partially resolved for the cheapest price until they became faulty again. He was rude, and he was arrogant. Not a pleasant landlord in the slightest. I really would warn any student in Selly Oak to steer clear.

Where do we start then? Our house got burgled on the first day despite locking all the doors and setting the alarm. The only person who knew we were out the house for the weekend was the maintenance man, there was no forced entry (just a deactivated alarm) and the police said that this has activity has happened before under Mr Sandground. The police also said that the alarms should be changed each year and to not a simple number which can be guessed, both of which were ignored. So we felt rather vulnerable in the house from day one!
After persistent leaks in our bathroom and persistent 'repairs' to solve the issue, the leaks got worse as water was coming out very fast through the smoke detector. Mr Sandground performed a dramatic U-turn and shifted the blame on us saying we overfilled the sink whilst out the house (the sink was empty), which was laughable to be honest. When the floor was removed in the bathroom, the floorboards were black in areas due wood being wet and rotting over a very long period (we had been there for under two months). Mr Soundground then had the audacity to say that he brought round an expert (a lie) and this expert confirmed that we had overfilled the sink whilst out of the house... However, Mr Soundground's compassion shone for the first time as he agreed to give us new bathrooms, free of charge! Bit of a side-note, the maintenance man used my flat-mates' bathmat to soak up the leak and then the maintenance man threw it away.
At the end of our contract, we were obliged to clean the carpets with a rug doctor, which seemed a little excessive and took us a week and a lot of money to clean the whole house (make sure you read the contract folks!). Mr Soundground then had the nerve to keep £150 of our deposit from "damages", over some stains on the mattress. The only reasonable charge was for a small chip in the desk (although £70 over a small chip is ridiculous). However, the following tenants told us that none of these damages t had been repaired. I wonder how Mr Sandground used this £150? Also the house was dirty when we moved in with stains, bugs and condom packets so I hope they got charged substantially more than us!
Another unprofessional thing about the landlord’s staff... we had a different maintenance man when the washing machine broke down and he decided to steal a pound coin from the machine!
A final word would be about his devious online activity and reputation. Everyone I have spoken to, including fellow tenants of his, university housing staff and the police, have a very negative review of him. So, as many people do on social media, we like to inform others about his behaviour and give people the heads up about the notorious Mr Soundground. There is a Facebook page called "Fan N Fresh - New" which everyone at UoB uses to communicate to each other and share helpful info. However, there have been numerous occasions where a post about Mr Soundground has been uploaded, gained support in the comments and reactions (likes, hearts etc) and then the post gets removed from the page. These posts are all helpful, advisory and most importantly truthful for others to see (has happened to my house mates a few times). Mr Sandground has somehow found a way to suppress posts he doesn't like on Facebook. I wanted to write this truthful post on this website as it should be less likely to get removed, but we'll see. Something out of Soviet Russia I say!

Poor service, with the impression that the landlord was seeking to make a profit at every opportunity. Required the Deposit Protection Certificate resolution to secure the full deposit return. Poor administration, losing several emails and refusing to communicate fully despite several requests.

A completely unprofessional and incompetent service provided.
Refused to acknowledge our requests for repairs. Our emails were often completely ignored for weeks or when we did receive a reply he refused to acknowledge our requests or tried to blame us for things which we could not conceivably have caused eg. broken central heating. Many appliances were broken throughout the year including the washing machine which was broken for the entire duration of our tenancy, the fridge freezer and the radiators which meant the home was freezing cold in the winter.
We also had a number of water leaks throughout the property, including the shower and washing machine. At one point water was coming through electrical light fittings and the exterior walls/ceiling of the property this got much worse after repairs were neglected for so long.

Richard and his company were frequently aggressive and rude to the tenants and guarantors. When he was challenged upon longstanding disrepair he suggested we should move out.

PoshPads also entered the home illegally, without providing 24h notice on multiple occasions, or if it wasn't him doing this then it was his contractors attempting repairs.
Richard's housing contracts often contain illegal clauses eg. tenants must be required to allow landlord access with less than twenty four hours notice. Furthermore the contact required tenants to pay for professional cleaning of carpets, windows and ovens before move out which ended up being very expensive. Despite this the charges made out of our deposits were excessive and unreasonable.
I would not recommend this landlord or his company PoshPads to anyone. As if the extensive disrepair to the house was not enough his unprofessional and aggressive behaviour caused us a lot of stress throughout the year.

Responded to repair requests quickly but could be very rude and not nice to deal with.

Cannot say a nice word about richard. Utterly unbelievably terrible service. Not a single pleasurable memory about him or his company. Treat him with great caution.
Be warned that if you do make the mistake of signing a contract with PoshPads/Richard Sandground/Sherly Sandground/any other name they use to get around their bad reviews, be sure to take photographs of everything, even better find out who the old tenants were. We were charged for multiple undue costs at the end of our tenancy, including things which had been paid for by the previous group of tenants and no action had been taken (they were charged for a whole new bedroom carpet due to a burn mark, but we were also charged for this. Evidence he just pockets the money and tries it again with the next batch of unsuspecting tenants).
Be prepared to be accused of breaking everything, if something goes wrong be ready to be told that it's your fault and battle through weeks of email before someone is sent out to deal with it. If a bloke called Simon comes to deal with it keep an eye on him in your house, he fixed our leaking shower by wrapping a flannel around the pipe and then boarding it back up.. He then went on to accidentally email us telling us to "f*ck off" as we complained about this method of repair. To which he then claimed to be talking "about the immigrants" when we told him he had sent us this email clearly not intended for us.
Sadly we were not a one off, we know of plenty of people who have suffered under Richard. He must know it too, because when we moved out we were sent an email telling us that he was "good friends" with our new landlord and that a "close family friend" was moving in after us. Both lies, and both suspected scare tactics to not talk to our new landlord or his new tenants about his methods.