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★☆☆☆☆

“Dishonest and Unprofessional”

written by robo33 on 26/11/2015

Honesty, courtesy, customer care and professionalism are words that, in our bitter experience, could never be associated with Countrywide Residential Letting and their subsidiary, Fulfords Lettings of Exmouth. It is glaringly obvious that they are interested only in making money – by any means. In our short but unhappy dealings with this organisation, they were grossly dishonest, indifferent, rude and amateur in all their dealings. So much so that we took them to the Property Ombudsman, who eventually awarded in our favour.

Firstly, and most importantly, the employee at Fulfords lied about obtaining a reference from the previous letting agents, failed to do a proper financial check and thus landed us with the proverbial ‘tenants from hell’. A 30 second Google search showing a Court report regarding one of these tenants would have shown their undesirability. In short, neighbours were subjected to obscene screaming, noise and abuse from the day they moved in. Damage was caused to the property, police were involved several times and they lied on their application form regarding their previous tenancy and being non-smokers. When we finally got them out, we were again lied to by Fulfords about the final inspection. Our complaints were shockingly badly dealt with by Countrywide Residential Lettings throughout, while they repeatedly broke the Property Ombudsman’s Code of Practice.

At no stage was any apology made for the considerable stress and expense caused by Fulfords’ gross negligence. When the award cheque was received from Countrywide, there was still no letter of apology and unfortunately, everything seemed to point to the fact that Countrywide Residential Lettings management condoned their staff’s lamentable behaviour. They appear to support a policy of obtaining business by any means, with no fear of staff losing their jobs. This is backed up, not just by our deeply unpleasant experience, but also by the large number of negative reviews on the Internet, their low ranking among their competitors and lack of any signs that senior management, from the CEO downwards, were prepared to take any action to correct their lack of business ethics.

My advice is to avoid them or it could cost you dear, and not just in monetary terms. Every organisation makes occasional mistakes but it is how these are dealt with that shows the true worth of any company. As far as I am concerned, Countrywide Residential Lettings and Fulford Residential Letting failed dismally with every aspect of what they laughingly called ‘award-winning service’ and customer care doesn’t appear to be in their vocabulary.

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