UK Landlord Forum / Life

Hello,
I'm hoping you can help me with the problem we have.
We purchased property with tenant in situ – we took agency to manage the property (same agency we used to purchase the house).
And the problems began – from the beginning, all the statements received from them were a bit unclear, agent was not very helpful and kept sending us copies of statements instead explanations. It took us a while to get to the bottom of all the fees and money we are receiving.

The tenant is with DSS and the council is paying however the tenant is not. Of course, the agency is charging us for everything received from the council but does nothing to recover rest of rent from the tenant.
We wanted to finish this nightmare and asked agent to serve notice. They done so on the 9 December and the tenant was supposed to move out on 14 Feb. I contacted the agent at the end of Jan to see how the tenant is doing with the move etc. but agency said they haven't heard anything from the tenant. I rang again few days later and was told that agency cannot ring tenant more than once a week and that they will update us as soon as they have any news.
I left it and heard nothing till rang on the 14 Feb – the day of the move. I was told I need to speak to the agency's main office (not the agent I was talking to all the time) and the lady there said that "unfortunately" wrong notice has been served and that they have now issued a correct notice so now the move out date is supposed to be 16 March. She said she can only apologize for the mistake and that was it.
The tenant is now over £700 in arrears, agency said they can only try and recover outstanding amount from the deposit – but the deposit was £585 so we will never receive full amount.
We checked the original agreement and the tenant never had a guarantor, when the agency we use now took over, they never changed the agreement and never asked for a guarantor.. not sure whether they should have or not.
We feel we are being brushed off by the agent. He made a comment that it will cost us a lot to get the tenants evicted and best is that we continue with the set arrangements.  Of course they know that when the tenant moves out the agreement between us and the agency terminates (we checked this with them).
I also feel that we are being treated as second class citizens  - we are Polish and our English is not brilliant (I asked a friend to check this post) but it is not basic and we are not stupid. We feel the whole management and service is below standards.
My question is – can we do anything to request compensation from the agent on the grounds of negligence and / or mismanagement?
Let me mention that they are members of Property Ombudsman.
Thank you for your help!

It will all start with making a formal complaint, to the Agent. Only once that hasn't gotten you satisfaction will you be able to consider an escalation. It is always possible to request compensation, but understand that the Agent knows you're not a big player and, as well, that you intend to dispense with their 'services'. If you accept that then you may understand that there's little incentive for the Agent to do, well, anything for you.

Witamy na forum Irene.

The eviction procedure can be difficult, but the Agent is even more difficult to deal with.
They are professionals at avoiding their own financial payouts.
In my short time as a landlord, I have learned to be VERY careful about which tenants I take on.
I am ware that English and Polish contracts are very similar, but other countries (even in Europe) can be very different.
Trust me, you are not being treated as 2nd class citizens simply because you are Polish, because English landlords are treated exactly the same way!

The best thing to do is to get the tenant to leave, as cheaply as possible, and find a new tenant who is more capable of paying their rental agreements.
In my opinion the Agents are terrible in England.

Thank you!
That's basically what we wanna do - get rid of the tenant and rent without the agent. This is our second property and the first one managed by agent.
In the nearest future we would like to move back to Poland that's why we wanted to trial the agency to see if they could manage our properties for us..

So, basically there isn't much we could do? What about the Ombundsman?