Last year, the number of complaints against letting agents soared, making them by far the biggest part of the Property Ombudsman’s workload.
The number of complaints against sales agents was also up, but formed only 27% of the workload, against the 53% formed by complaints about letting agents.
In 2012, the Ombudsman received a total of 15,782 complaints, including those made against both sales and lettings agents, a 12% increase from 2011 when there were 14,066 complaints.
The increase of 1,716 initial complaints was compounded by a 39% increase in the number of cases referred for formal review or easy resolution (up from 1,419 in 2011 to 1,970 last year).
The increased workload caught the service out, Ombudsman Christopher Hamer admitted. He had forecast the workload to be 16% less, which meant longer times to review complaints. He said: “We are gradually bringing the situation back to a more acceptable level.”
Individual letting inquiries increased by 9% (to 8,334) during which consumers raised a total of 14,017 different issues. Of those complaints, 934 proceeded to formal review, up from 768 the year before.
Landlord complaints, at 399, were ahead of tenant complaints at 330, with third parties responsible for nine of the complaints that went to review. Strikingly, the large bulk of complaints that went to review were from Greater London (25%) and the South-East (26%).
In total, the Ombudsman supported almost three-quarters of complaints against lettings agents (73.8%).
Poor service was the biggest cause of complaint (54%) while issues about letting agent fees and charges were raised in 12% of inquiries.
Of those cases which went on to be investigated by the Ombudsman, 50% of issues concerned poor service whilst the percentage of fees and charges issues increased to 20%.
There were also complaints about holding deposits, and Hamer has expressed his own views on these, saying that where an agent retains a sum of, typically £500, which is kept when the tenant pulls out, that is not a fair approach.
He says that agents should only charge a prospective tenant up-front for referencing and “any other reasonable administration costs”. It should also be made absolutely clear that a prospective tenant stands to forfeit these amounts if they do not proceed, but if they do go ahead with the tenancy, that the money is credited against future rent.
Currently, 11,933 sales offices and 9,748 lettings offices are signed up to TPO. Last year, 1,047 new letting agents joined.
The Property Ombudsman’s 2012 Annual Report can be downloaded using the link below. It is particularly worth reading for the case studies, including the one about the landlord who regularly used the tenants’ loo – a matter which cost the agent more than a penny. Another case resulted in an award being made against the agent for £6,275 after the agent’s “reckless referencing”.
http://www.tpos.co.uk/annual_reports.htm
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Comments
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Who cares about these %age boys? Give us numbers against the number of agents against the number of rented properties and see what this shows. I bet it's not many complaints per agent.
How many complaints go to the council's from their tenants and again what are the numbers. Not much different no doubt. This must be used as a comp or whats the point of these %%%%%%%%%%% for the private sector as there is no benchmark to work either to or from.
Answers on a postcard please.
Actually this is not a bad idea as there is an Ombudsman of Ombudsmen, a Chief Ombudsman.
So presumably all the indians report to the Chief?
And presumably that is where you can go to complain about how an Ombudsman deals with a complaint and generally discharges their duties?
Emperor Hamer is building nup his empire. Buried deep on page 20 (out of 62) are the real facts. TPO investigated 8334 complaints and upheld just 738 of these! Hardly earth shattering statistics.
I like the idea of an Ombudsman to oversee the Ombudsmen.
An attempt at justifying their being?
This is a non-story that is of interest only to the TPO.
The rest of us are not surprised when one considers the change in the market and the fact that it has brought many inexperienced and untrained estate (sales) agents into the booming lettings market .
By the way I am not joining the hysterical 'regulation at all costs' mantra by vested interests, or future vested interests.
ARLA, get your act together and educate the general public instead of majoring on flogging stuff to your members
Surely it must be time to have an ombudsman's office where we can take our complaints about the nonsense proffered by other ombudsmen and their merry bands of half educated twits?
So a Letting agent which has a continual relationship with both Landlord and Tenant throughout the term of the tenancy, deals with references, drawing up legal documents and deposit negotiations as wells as maintenance, disturbance issues and court proceedings gets more complaints then sales agents who preside over a single sale using third parties for the legal elements?
Who could possibly have predicted this outcome? Not this stunned reader that's for sure.
As potsed yesterday at greater length in EAT if the sales market falls and lettings increases so presumably with the balance of complaints - won't they?
As also posted yesterday if there are 15000 letting agents that is one compalint a year for every other agent in thre uK - I'd say that was pretty good customer service!!
They didn't yesterday and they don't today
27% ADD 53% is 80%, who else complained to the property ombudsman or is the other 20% of their workload schmoozing mates and contacts?
TPO is one of main reasons why membership of NAEA and ARLA have fallen. While it satisfies the obligation to give somewhere for the public to make a complaint, the lack of any requirement other cash to register with TPO actually allows those who don't meet a set standard to practice.
All this lobbying parliament by a commercial, for profit organisation under the guise of in the public interest is simply sickening
Let NAEA and ARLA free themselves of the dark history of NFoPP and return to setting and administering standards.
Without a detailed breakdown of the complaints, the nature, the justification and outcome of the complaints the stats put forward by TPO to justify their and PBK's call for licencing is merely scarmongering propaganda. Lets hope those being so heavilly lobbied have the good sense to see what is going on.