Tag: broken boiler

CPS

CPS Homes is…. ok. Barely ok

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

Capital Properties

Capital Crisis

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