Letting and Estate agents
Rented with them for 2 years and they’re easily one of the best landlords in Cardiff. Run by a father and daughter, genuine people. Their houses are immaculate and brilliantly maintained. They provide much more than most landlords – TV and Dishwasher. They even give gift cards for tenants that keep the house clean and tidy. You couldn’t ask for anything more.
Rent: £380
Deposit Returned?: Didn’t have one
Told cps there were rats in the ceiling and they refused to help. Told us it was our fault and then asked for images … Urm wtf? Of what a rat?
[Maybe they were hoping to go viral with a selfie rat?]
Rent: £800
Deposit Returned?: Still living at the hole in question
Lovely lettings agents – all staff are friendly and up for a giggle with us. Most staff are young, approachable women. Small touches like a goodybag, free coffee and cake when you move in and check-in e-mails make us feel well looked after as tenants. They are speedy with maintenance issues, with replies within 1-2 weeks. They always give at least 48-72 hours notice before coming around. The communication between landlady and them are always efficient. The house is gorgeous. We’ve had no issues thus far, and got the deposit back in a short space of time.
Rent: 360
Deposit returned?: Yes
Firstly we agreed to pay half rent for July and they gave us the electricity bill and which was about £400. Then they changed our energy supplier on the 2nd August the day after we moved in to a different one which prevented us from making a deal with the original energy supplier which was the cheapest. When trying to get hold of them about it they’re avoiding it.
[Your landlord or agency should not be switching suppliers if you are the one paying the bill. However they pay the bills for you, they are within the right to choose the supplier. You can find more info on this here.]
Rent: 335
Deposit Returned?: Still living in the hole in question
CPS are honestly the worst agency I’ve ever had the misfortune of dealing with. Me and 4 others lived at 76 Colum road in Cardiff, a seemingly lovely refurbished new house, no contact with the landlord and all problems to be dealt with CPS directly. (Using Rent Smart Wales we found our their landlords were Andrew Winsor and Gaynor Grace Winsor.)
Where to start?… well how about the start! The end of our first week of moving in I noticed the smell of gas coming from the kitchen, upon ringing cps and a gas man coming to deal with it he told us the leak on the ground floor was strong enough that if someone was living in the downstairs bedroom there’s a chance they may have died, it was a potentially lethal gas leak.
In our first month in the house, we noticed multiple problems, the downstairs bathroom having a pipe that leaked whenever the toilet was used, the kitchen oven was lodged out of place and rattled whenever being used, mould all over the front room wall behind the sofas, a window frame in the upstairs front bedroom that couldn’t close and a long list of smaller problems.
Obviously we reported all of these problems to CPS and the only one that was sorted was the leaking pipe in the bathroom.
Here we are 12 months later, having moved out 2 months ago, still without our deposit back and we’re being charged for all the things listed above and more. £101 for a cleaner to do 2 hours of cleaning in the house? What was £359 off our deposit has now become £399? Half of which is the problems that we had already told them about and they did nothing to sort out, now we have to pay?!?
Their an absolute joke and unfortunately own the monopoly on Cardiff’s student housing but I pray that one day they get put in their place and sort it out!
Rent: 350
Deposit Returned?: No
CPS get a lot of terrible reviews (justly deserved) but I just wanted to write this to show they can be ok? Note: I was a young professional living with students I don’t know if this made a difference. My landlord was Dr Saha.
The house itself was like most student houses for this price, in need of TLC. We did have a few issues like the boiler breaking, the sink collapsing, slugs and mice but these were all dealt with by CPS and pretty quickly actually. Any time I called CPS or came into their Cathays branch they were helpful and friendly.
We got £60 taken off our deposit for “light cleaning” which was fair enough I guess, despite my hours spent scrubbing the house spotless… but considering my housemates had been with CPS and never got any of their deposit back, that’s pretty good. I did go through the DPS to get it back.
My one major issue was the viewings. They sent an email basically saying “We are going to come whenever, here is your notice”, then they would send a text like 20 mins before arriving. Once was on a Saturday, they showed up at 10.10 am after sending a text at 10.00… What if I had been asleep?
TL:DR – if they gave more notice on viewings they would be ok?
Rent: 300
Deposit returned?: Partially
It’s my 3rd year living with Condor properties, and they’ve always been great. There’s no deposit & no agency fees which is a bonus & never had to pay for any silly damage etc. when moving from one Condor property to another. The staff contacts & maintenance team are all really lovely & helpful and get broken stuff sorted really fast. Furniture all matches nicely and the houses are all refurbished to a good standard. Bills are included in the rent price, and we pay in a term chunk when student loan comes in. Honestly only positive things to say about them definitely recommend never had any problems.
Rent: £368
Deposit Returned?: Didn’t have one
We decided to rent a house with CPS for our second year, a mistake. Aside from paying half rent over summer (2018) for a property we didn’t even have the keys for, all seemed ok…
Until we actually moved in, the kitchen was filthy, it took my housemate hours to clean it. At least my room came with a free gift, a pair of mouldy high heels at the back of the wardrobe!
After a few weeks living in the property, I noticed a thick layer of mould along the wall below the window sill. Around the same time, I started getting recurrent chest infections. Even after wiping it off, it came back after a few days. I contacted CPS who blamed me for the issue and reminded me of the ‘expensive dehumidifiers’ the landlord had purchased, out of the goodness of his heart! And told me to open a window.
Evidently these were measures we were already taking, two dehumidifiers don’t divide well between five tenants, and the fact that my room was on the first floor – particularly in autumn/winter, I obviously couldn’t keep the windows open 24/7.
Yet despite measures we took, the damp still accumulated every couple of days in huge amounts. I continued to email CPS, who maintained it was entirely my fault, and that it’s completely normal to wipe mould off a wall every few days, basic upkeep I suppose! I continued to have constant chest infections and even started coughing up blood from sleeping in a shithole every night. I spoke to my GP, who suggested the mould was likely contributing to it (I didn’t experience anything like it before I moved in).
Eventually (after emailing CPS consistently) I asked the council to send someone over to have a look, who advised the window needed to be resealed at the bottom, and the breeze of cold, damp air entering the room didn’t help. At this point we managed to get in contact with the landlord directly, who was happy to get it resealed quickly and take other measures to resolve it – funny, he didn’t seem to be aware of the issues that had been occurring, it seems CPS wasn’t even doing the bare minimum of letting him know of our concerns.
However, my personal favorite experience of CPS, was getting a knock on my bedroom door in the morning, followed by someone trying to open it (followed by 5 random students doing a viewing), as I lay naked in my bed, trying to get some rest after a night shift. When I told them to ‘fuck off’, the agent got a bit shitty, I suppose it is out of order denying strangers access to my bedroom and a view of my tits. Fortunately, CPS had graced us with a text message notice, 20 minutes before they arrived, clearly I was in the wrong for not hearing my phone go off whilst sleeping off my shift.
[This is completely out of order, 24 hours notice must be given and you have the right to refuse entry. ]
They also knocked on the bathroom door when I was doing a shit once, again without notice. I’m not sure how their potential tenants felt viewing the bathroom, as the scent of my feces, mixed with the Febreeze I attempted to cover it with, wafted towards them.
When we questioned this and the whole 24-hour notice rule, they told us they would give us notice every single morning otherwise, how thoughtful of them.
(Photos attached are after the 2 weeks I was home for Christmas, clearly I should have kept the dehumidifiers on, the window open, and returned every couple of days to wipe the walls down)
Rent: £325
Deposit returned?: Yes
We rented a house through Capital Properties in Cathays. We have rented with CPS and 2let2 before and neither compares to the experience we had at this house. When we first moved in the house was in an absolute state. Mouldy curtains, thick black mould in kitchen, YEARS worth of filth, brown and orange stains, broken furniture (beds missing leg frames and completely collapsed, wardrobes damaged and held together by chewing gum) and stained mattress covers. It was so disgusting we wrote and called repeatedly until they came and repainted the bedrooms. As for the black mould – the roof needed structural repair. After being told the bathroom renovation and roof would be done within around 10 days, I can tell you now this was an absolute lie. Months later the work was finally done, only to discover the newly fitted shower and the existing one upstairs didn’t work. Straight away we knew we had an issue with the boiler as the showers wouldn’t get warm, and it took them MONTHS to even send someone out to see what the issue was.
The maintenance man – a shoddy, untrained, unprofessional, misogynistic man who barely fixed anything and regularly fly-tipped broken furniture we forced them to remove from our property. Not only is he a maintenance man – he is a part-time bailiff – after one of us locked ourselves out of our room (we were still in the house) at 10 am on a Saturday he attempted to charge us £80, when we refused he waited outside our house for almost a week demanding to see my housemate. When asked why the charges were not £30 as in the tenancy agreement, he shouted: “that’s nothing to do with me!” – a professional at heart.
The landlords aka ‘Capital Properties’ – Anne Marie Hamzelou and Nader Hamzelou routinely take it in turns to direct Capital Properties, who conveniently have no public office you can visit and reliable phone number to reach them on. Interestingly, a quick search on Rent Smart Wales (the governing body for rented properties) will reveal that neither our landlord (Nader) nor capital properties held a supposed license to rent our property to us in the first place. After lodging a complaint with RSW and speaking to the council, they came and inspected the property – concluding that one of the rooms was actually not permissible and required structural change. We presume the council’s recent enlightenment was the only reason we were able to get the majority of our deposit back.
[Rent Smart Wales is a great resource and you can find their landlord listings here, if your landlord isn’t on here and own an HMO then they are breaking the law.
https://www.rentsmart.gov.wales/en/check-register/ ]
The year we rented with Capital Properties was the most stressful I have had to date, they are a shambles of a ‘company’.
DO NOT rent with them.
Rent: £340
Deposit returned?: Partially
We rented with Orinoco. When we moved in the fridge was full of maggots (initially they denied all responsibility and refused to clean), there were rats inside the house, mould on the walls, chewing gum on the floors, drug residue in the draws (burnt spoons, ripped foil, needles) and the whole house was dirty and had a musky smell. Throughout the tenancy we transformed the house, we deep cleaned it ourselves on move in, then again when Orinoco wanted to take photos for their website, for all their viewings and finally on move out (the place was spotless). During one of the deep cleans we took off the extractor fan chimneys to find that they weren’t connected to an external source, instead the smoke and steam was pumped straight back into the room. Not to mention the fact that throughout lockdown I transformed the garden from an overgrown skip to clean, tidy, presentable garden.
On move out the agent attended the property and commented on how clean it was and stated they would only charge for a burnt window sill in one of the rooms (fair enough). I was then shocked to receive a list of charges (mainly cleaning) worth £340. To top off the negligence and disgraceful nature of this company when trying to dispute their charges they took days to respond to every email. After numerous emails I managed to get the charges down to £140 (still £110 too much). At this point they said to accept it or consult a deposit agency where they threatened to charge the full £340. Not happy, will not rent with them again and would not recommend them to anyone! Avoid at all costs!!
Rent: £340
Deposit Returned?: Partially
