Martin & Co.? Never again

“Martin & Co.? Never again”

Written on: 18/07/2011

I will never rent from Martin & Co. ever again and would not recommend them even to my worst enemy. The standards of customer service at the Stirling branch are unprofessional at the very least. I never liked the way we were spoken to on the phone or at the office. Just because we're students doesn't mean we deserve to be treated worse than any other tenant - we still pay the rent!
We had numerous complaints to make throughout the year such as a leaking roof that we were told ''has been a problem for a while but doesn't seem to be particularly serious''. They only realised the seriousness of the matter once the living room wall got moist! It turned out there was a tile missing from the roof.
We also had problems with our heating system i.e. it broke in the middle of a very cold winter and we had to wait quite a while for anyone to see to it. It wasn't fixed properly so we had the maintenance guy come by again...
Soon after moving in our toilet flush broke - we reported it and it got fixed but broke again and stayed broken for the rest of the year causing numerous embarrassing situations when we had guests over.
A few times when we had contractors coming over to do work, they arrived without prior warning. We received notifications of their arrival by TEXT MESSAGE! after they'd been and gone. One even arrived at 8 am when we were all still in bed and really not expecting a knock on the door.
Now that we've moved out, we're having trouble with the deposit. I scrubbed my bathroom with bleach yet apparently this is still ''leaves a lot to be desired''. I'm a tenant - I don't have access to professional strength cleaning liquids and bleach worked! The bathroom was spotless as was my bedroom, which apparently also wasn't up to scratch.
While writing this, I keep remembering other complaints I've had over the 10months we rented from them... The lady in the office who deals with rent payments can't do math and tried to charge us more than we were meant to pay. Thankfully my flatmate was a maths student!
Our vacuum cleaner broke (it came with the flat so it wasn't our responsibility to replace it) so we reported it to Martin & Co. who told us to repair it. Luckily we had a service centre just down the road but the repair man informed us it would be a lost cause to fix it. We passed on the info to the letting agency, got no response and waited until our floors got so dirty that we had to call the landlord directly. He told us to buy a new vacuum and gave us the money back 2 days later saying in the future we should contact him directly for any queries and avoid phoning the agency...
So you see, I have a lot of reasons for disrecommending the agency. Others I know have had troubles too but I'll let them write their own reviews.