Martin & Co in United Kingdom

An awful letting agency -would never trust again!! Showed me a virtual video of an apartment to rent and asked me to pay a holding deposit for referencing. When I paid and went to see a couple of weeks later, it was a disgusting place and very much different to the one I saw online. An awful place in terms of seriously stained and dirty walls and furniture, damage to the wall, excessive dirt and mould on the floor that was disgusting, stains everywhere on furniture, and broken furniture. The guy showing me around apologised and said this must have happened in the last week since the virtual viewing!!! -which is unbelievable!. More shockingly, refused to refund all my holding deposit despite escalating it to their letting director!! Shame on them!

Got the move in date wrong by a month - move in day came and they said oh uhhh hold on we have to do some repairs. This continued two weeks until they said oh uhh its ready but the landlord won't clear it. End result was sticking everything in storage and being homeless for a week. It turned out the landlord was very clear regarding move in dates, Martin & Co just messed it up and tried to shift the blame. Someone from a more central office ended up intervening.
Took them several months to fix our request for a working boiler. We just kept repressurising it every day in the middle of winter. Other things like leaks were fixed relatively fast.
Constantly kept trying to do inspections of which half they actually showed up for. The outcome of failing them was never particularly clear but it was annoying when leaving a laundry basket out or having a party meant a condescending email later that week.
At the end of the tenancy they sent an email, addressed for the landlord (woops!), discussing how to best claim as much deposit as possible. Wanted four times as much as would be reasonable, still fighting it with DPS.
They get 2 rather than 1 star because most issues were incompetence rather than malice and they did have some nice individuals on their team.

It took till Christmas break before anything was done about the mould in the downstairs room. We were left without a working oven for 6 weeks despitegetting in contact with the landlords multiple times. The plunger on the toilet broke leaving it difficult to flush, we were told that maintenance would be found asap yet did not see them after 2 weeks, we contacted the landlords again and it turns out maintenance had attended the wrong house, useless. During the summer, maintenance began renovations on the bathroom changing the radiator which had been rusty and not 100% function for the first year. Then they replaced the sink which was a hygiene problem for the whole first year. They ripped it out and replaced it with a nice sink and cupboard. However, where the old sink was attached to the bath this had left a large hole revealing the underside of the bath. We were told maintenance would return soon to finish the refurbishments. 10 months have passed and this is yet to be finished!! Landlords are very difficult to communicate with they never check up with us see how we are doing. If we message them it takes days for them to reply.

I was not informed until my tenancy start date how much deposit I needed to pay and my housemates did not receive copies of their agreement until November/December (our tenancy began in September). The repair on the broken back garage door is still pending though the request was put in before summer by my Housemate and they 'changed their policy' meaning they could no longer top up the electricity meter which we were not made aware of. This is stated on the agreement as their responsibility.

Also, was given keys a few days after I moved in and they did not work in the front door.

Over priced. Didn’t appear to do anything considering their costs and fees. No explanations given

Agency staff mostly tried to be helpful but it's clear they have terrible communication and record-keeping.

You'd contact them about something, chase them up a month later and they would have no idea what you were talking about. They would also regularly mix up requests and messages, so when they finally got back to you it would be to answer a completely different question from the one you asked. Among other things, this led to us having a broken front door lock for 6 weeks (another tenant eventually fixed it since it was clear Martin & Co never would), and having a (terrible, cheap) sofa dumped in our living room after we explicitly told them several times that we didn't have space for a new sofa.

They forget to schedule important things (e.g. gas safety inspections), then blame you for the lateness and send letters threatening eviction because you've failed to do something they haven't asked you to do yet. They send contractors out to do repairs before they've authorised purchase of materials.They no-show on agreed inspections and when you contact them, they say "Oh, we cancelled that a week ago, didn't anyone tell you?"

The only part of interacting with them which wasn't incredibly frustrating was the check-out process, which went very smoothly, and they didn't stiff us on the deposit.

Martin & Co were very good when it came to paperwork and that side of the process at the start of the tenancy. The referencing checks via a third-party service were slightly long winded but all fairly standard procedure. Communication throughout the tenancy however was rather poor - we were often given wrong information about the times of viewings and when it came to arranging the checkout date at the end of the tenancy, despite replying straight away with a date when asked it took months to sort out and we were left not knowing what day we would have to move out by until one week before the end, when we were told the checkout would be AFTER we had left, giving us no chance to be there in person. Additionally, the split between it not being managed by the agents meant there was a lot of back and forth at the end in getting the deposit back (more on that in a second). It took a few trips to them in person and each exchange either by e-mail or in person did not seem professional and we were treated as though because we are young we do not matter or we do not understand what is going on. For us as 4th year students this was our 3rd private tenancy after student halls and 3rd agency to deal with, this was by far the worst out of all I've dealt with.

Martin & Co in St Albans were good, they were nice and friendly and prompt with handing the keys over.

I would use them again for sure.