It's a legal matter, baby

The title is a line from a song by The Who, which is what I am now humming to myself as I write...

Interesting - and of course, rantworthy - developments today! Firstly, a quick anecdote to further endorse the stereotype that all estate agents are arseholes (as if we really need to emphasise that!). Today, at 6pm, my housemate H and I were supposed to go and view a property which we were kinda hopeful about as, from the advert at least, it seems to meet all our criteria. At 5.55pm I was still on a bus and wouldn't be arriving in Stokey for another 10 minutes or so - H was in the same situation. Out of courtesy, cos I'm nice like that, I called the estate agent to let her know that we would be a little late...

"Oh...didn't you get my message? I wasn't able to pick up the keys from the landlord today and won't be able to do it now until 11am tomorrow morning".

In other words, she forgot. Neither me or H had had a voicemail, a missed call or even a text message to say that the agent wouldn't be coming. RUDE!!!

Anecdote 2 for today, which is likely to be a series over the next few weeks, months or maybe even years, is that we have decided to take legal action against our landlord [fanfare please!]. Now, I have to admit, I am a little uneasy about this so let me explain further.

The rent for our house is £1500 plus all bills. When we moved in there were only 3 of us, so this was stretching our budget quite a bit, but my friend K moved into our spare room which eased the burden of our outgoings considerably. When we signed the new contract upon K's arrival to the house, we noticed something unusual...our contract said that the rent was "£1500 per calendar month, inclusive of bills excepting electricity". Hang on...!? We queried the estage agent (who, remember, from previous posts, is a retard) and she was adamant that the contract was correct. "I mean, it is the norm for bills to not be included, so we have obviously had to draw up a special contract for this arrangement", she said. We had already been messed around for too long by this woman, so for an easy life we signed the contract.

When our landlord made one of his surprise visits a few weeks later, we showed him the contract, which he also had signed, and he was as surprised as us to discover that he was meant to be paying our bills. I guess both parties here were in the wrong in a way as we hadn't read the contract carefully enough, but from our point of view, we had nothing to lose! Although he seemed a little concerned, he has never done anything about it. We have continued to pay our bills, and he's continued to take our rent.

Now, sick to the back teeth of landlords, estate agents and dishonest people in the property industry, we've decided to try and claim our bill money back. H found this website: https://www.moneyclaim.gov.uk/csmco/index.jsp, which, for a small fee, seems to suggest it will be pretty easy and painless for us to get our money back. Any thoughts, guys? What would you do?