Ian Dowse in Hanham

We never met the landlord all our contact was only with the agency or the maintenance. We were never given any contact details for him

The people last year had nothing but neverending problems with him and we found it to be similar. He made us pay full rent for the lockdown when university and everything is shutdown and people went home and he won't even speak to us about it when we have to pay his rent with bank overdrafts but he doesnt care about people

when we moved in the place wasn't cleaned from the last group and the garden had litter and is completely overgrown with weeds

This man can be very nasty please take care if you take his house and have photos ready for when he tries to pull a fast one

The landlord demanded we start paying rent less than a week after agreeing to take the property - he then refused to answer his phone for 5 days when the letting agency called - so by the time he finally replied we had to start paying rent in 2 days time with none of the paperwork done, and then the letting agency kept making mistakes in the contract and had to keep reissuing it, the end result was us having to pay rent for several weeks with no access to the keys!

Over the first couple of months the cooker, washing machine and fridge all broke - and we were given the option of having a very quick cheap replacement, or waiting for a "quality replacement" so that the landlord could shop around for a bargain on sale - causing us to be without a washing machine and a fridge for a month. He then acted like he was doing us a favour by getting better equipment even though it was an investment for his own property - he then jacked up the rent from 550 to 615 for the next group of students to pay for having to replace broken appliances with 2nd hand appliances he got on sale!

When we complained that he seemed to intend to rent out the property to the next group of students without an appropriate gap to repair anything - he accused us of lying and threatened us!

We discovered that the maintenance man "Neil", who regularly ragged on the landlord and acted friendly with us and pretended to look out for us is actually the landlord's brother! Neil keeps this a secret and talks about the landlord as if he's just someone he works for, but then secretly passes along information to Ian Dowse which could be useful.

Neil told one of the girls it was ok to have a key to her room, but then went and told his brother Ian Dowse who threatened us with "expensive locksmiths" when I complained to the estate agent that he was trying to rent out the property to the next group of students without fixing any of the maintenance issues. He also said I should "think carefully" and that expensive photographs would need to be taken to assure him of the maintenance of his leaking property, and that keys are against the tenancy agreement (even though his own brother said it was ok) - a threat to steal our deposits if we didn't stop complaining

Neil then made contact with my housemate who plugged the leak in his ceiling with leg wax strips - an issue the landlord claimed to both me and the agency didn't exist despite photos being provided!

He also refused to reconsider our tenancy during the corona crisis, giving him 4 months rent for an empty house. He said he considered us to already have a discount as we were paying £550pm and he was jacking up the rent to £615pm for the next group of students. When our MP contacted him to ask him to be reasonable with the rent during the pandemic he was rude and sarcastic, and asked why he should give students a discount during the corona pandemic and asked if the council was giving council tenants a discount.

He is a wealthy property developer and runs the company "HIGHFIELD DEVELOPMENTS" and has multiple properties he is renting to students, the students who had the place last year report he has about 7 properties he's renting to students.

The previous tenants told me he kept renovating the house when they were living here, causing them to live in poor conditions, and that the council keeps having to take him to court.

We never actually saw the landlord, all contact was through the agency although a few times two maintenance people popped in who were nice enough. We got in a dispute over our deposits at the end of the tenancy where the landlord made a load of ridiculous claims (for example £50 for rubbish removal when no rubbish was left behind, something like £70 for gardening when the front and back gardens were filled with weeds to begin with, money to fix banisters that were broken when we moved in, money to fix a window when none were broken). There was also a +£400 cleaning bill which took the overall amount claimed to over £800 despite doing what we would describe as a good domestic clean. The cleaning company seen on the invoice didn't exist and according to one of the new tenants, similar to when we moved in, it did not have the appearance of having had a professional clean. Luckily we took good photos when we moved in proving that on every count the landlord was wrong, leading us to get our whole deposits back. The tenants from the year before us said they had quite a few problems with the landlord too.