A Labour MP is to hold a public meeting after what she describes as a flood of horror stories about landlords and letting agents.
Stella Creasy, who represents Walthamstow in Greater London, will host the event tomorrow in conjunction with a local community action group.
Creasy said: “Keeping a roof above your head is becoming increasingly difficult for many in Walthamstow due to rising rents and poor-quality private housing, with some residents spending up to 60% or 70% of their monthly income on accommodation costs alone.
“In the course of the last year the horror stories about the behaviour of letting agents and landlords have been flooding into my office, and the campaigners have been working hard to gather evidence to help us name and shame the persistent offenders.”
Comments
Great post Dave ( NOT) I am not asking the question because I am incapable of looking up a word in a dictionary or on the internet.
The whole point of the question is to establish at what point roguery is affecting landlords, tenants or applicants.
If Roguing is happening solely in Lettings then the Professional Property Management agents have little to fear. For example( it is only a single example I am using to make the point and I am not suggesting it to be the only cause of roguery) if it can be established that the only practice that is causing complaint is the level of tenancy application fee to applicants who stand no chance of ever occupying the property on which a fee has been levied, removing Application fees removes the lifeblood of the 'Rogue Agent' without charging fees to applicants and without Management fees from Landlords the rogues have no income.
The problem is that there are simply too many agents most of whom consider themselves not rogue who are charging steep and excessive fees to tenants and because tenant fees provide a useful dollop of jam on top of the day to day bread and butter there is little motivation or will to reduce unjustified fees to tenants.
Beyond an inventory fee and £25 per person referenced there is little else and Agent can reasonably justify in the way of fees to tenants.
Why do agents charge heavy fees to tenants rather than their client landlords- as a means to win instruction against their competition. Many Agents who are uncompetitive on service win instructions based on cost to landlord, the more that can be charged to the tenant the lower the fee to the landlord.
By suggesting the industry works out who the rogues are and how they are earning a living is not a trick trolling question to those determined to blow their own trumpet for the entertainment of their ego and sycophant chums it is a way of getting the industry to arm itself to control rogues without waiting in vain for legislation to do the job for them.
ONLY when you lot work out how the rogues are making enough money to run the risk of being caught out will you control them. Calling for compulsory redress at £15/ office per year is no deterrent, compulsory CMP at £499.99 is no deterrent. All you are achieving is insisting everyone wears a balaclava so the good are indistinguishable from the bad.
You have demonstrated perfectly why the question is not a silly one. Your definition of rogue only allows rogues to be established after the loss or stress occurs and therefore provides nothing to regulate against.
If we add lack of qualification to your list we start to find a route to a solution.
I can bet my weeks wages your office accounts are not prepared by an unqualified accountant yet I would also go double or quits that your client account is not being run to the same qualified standard.
There is at least an 80% chance you are using software to receipt monies and balance your clients' bank account so I would ask you who from ARLA has looked at your system and said. "This system is compliant with our code of conduct"? Treble or quits, no-one!
The problem is Dave that there no single person or body in charge of the Lettings industry who have started at the bottom and worked through the list of things that can go wrong to cause loss or stress and only once the list is defined can such a process begin.
It is fine to dismiss any call for rogue to be defined and quantified but every one of the rogue symptoms you listed is being committed across the whole spectrum of Agency.
"A rogue is an agent who fails to comply with the Law and fails to protect or act in the customers best interests be it through lack of compliance, lack of training or intent."
If they're breaking laws or acting negligently then the courts can already provide remedy. If you make new regulations you still have to take them to court to get them enforced so why will having new laws be any different from the status quo if there is already a lack of enforcement?
@ You never did answer the question Eric
No, he didn't because it's a silly question and he is probably too busy. The term is used to describe agents who cause customers loss or undue stress through their actions or inactions whether intentionally or not.
A rogue is an agent who fails to comply with the Law and fails to protect or act in the customers best interests be it through lack of compliance, lack of training or intent. Ignorance is no defence.
It may not be a great term, but it covers everything from 'bent / crooked' to 'incompetent / apathetic'
Or....
1. An unprincipled, deceitful, and unreliable person; a scoundrel or rascal.
2. An organism that shows an undesirable variation from a standard.
3. A vicious and solitary animal, especially an elephant that has separated itself from its herd.
It is all well and good posting carefully prepared posts to show one in the best possible light but it is more than a tad embarrassing when one is unprepared to discuss the contents of said posts or blogs.
There are No rogue agents within 80 miles of here. Every single lettings and property management agent does a good job and competes on the traditional grounds of service, fees and personalities.
The one agent who set up with the potential to be rogue simply could not compete and was forced to the nearest city where the anonymity of a fragmented community allowed her roguery to germinate and flourish for a very short while. The end result of her roguery was a Landlord and Tenant base that had a better appreciation of the fee structure of the incumbent Agents.
I am fairly certain, based on extensive knowledge of the spectrum of agents across the country that Rogues exist but they are not agents and I am also certain that Rogues can not exist for long in the smaller towns and villages where every agent knows every other.
There seems to be little point in solving a problem that simply does not exist in large parts of the country for the sake of the minority who have not equipped themselves with the experience to deal with the problem.
Eric Walker has stated/ asked "we KNOW there is a rogue element and the question remains how to address it"
The answer is obvious and very simple; work out what the rogue element is, where they operate and how they operate. Only once the problem is qualified can one even begin to work out how to deal with it. To a profession that is paid to sort out problems for others it seems to me that the lettings Industry is failing to understand the problem it has.
No agency boss would tolerate an office junior pestering them with the statement "We have a problem and we need a plumber" There are basic questions that need asking, What is the problem? where is it? are essential questions that need to be asked before sending a Gas Cert plumber to fix an occasional drip on the hot tap of a property with an un-vented water heater (It is normal for them to drip)
Shelter introduced the term rogue they started with Rogue Landlords and moved on to Rogue Agents. I am sure the problem does exist but feel it down to the agents who have the problem to sort it out at a local level if and when they allow it to occur.
You were asked a reasonable and straight forward question, no trolling, no personal attack but you failed to even acknowledge the question let alone answer it.
What is a rogue agent and what constitutes roguery. Until Someone defines who is doing what wrong it is impossible to do anything about it.
If one is RICS then borrowing the Client account is no crime, if one is gormless one goes to jail for the same action. At some point someone will sit down and work out that much of the cries of roguery are simply to strengthen the call for regulation or a means to gain commercial advantage over ones competition.
I am not picking on you but you seem to be active in the pursuit of rogues and I would simply like to know who you are hunting down.
It's no bad thing, however we KNOW there is a rogue element and the question remains how to address it. Erroneously, in my opinion, the power that be rely upon these so called rogues volunteering to sign up to some form of regulation, redress or licensing. It doesn't take an an evil genius to work out the flaw in that plan.
These are often the same people who avoid tax, compliance etc., often at the expense of the most vulnerable.
The solution, I believe, has to be in empowering the victims, the tenants as I suggested earlier this year.
www.lettingagenttoday.co.uk/news_features/Eric-Walker-Blog
I am concerned about the behaviour of MP's.
Shame the Labour Party did nothing about this subject for years. The others aren't much better.