5 Clodien Avenue
I lived at 5 Clodien Avenue for two years between 2017-2019. I rented the house through Pinnacle, who let it as a three-bedroom but we later had someone move into the smaller room making it a four-bed. My landlord was Rebecca Lewis Jones. I paid around £330 during my time there.
When I first moved in the lock was faulty, and it took an hour and a half to get a locksmith out to let us in. I rented a van by the hour and so had to pay the extra costs. Pinnacle refused to reimburse this saying the lock wasn’t broken. The lock was incredibly unreliable needing a certain twist and push on the door to get it open. Pinnacle refused to replace it and it took me a year to get used to opening it properly.
The house itself was lovely but it soon became clear the landlord didn’t want the place let to students as it used to be her own home. This lead to some tension with her telling us we couldn’t use blu-tack or door hangers because of the damage. We spoke to Pinnacle and they said it was fine as any damage would come out of the deposit.
A few months after moving in a leak dripping from the kitchen ceiling, we immediately called Pinnacle and they sent a plumber over several hours later. This was despite repeated calls saying the dripping was getting worse. The plumber turned the water off and left and within the next hour, the ceiling collapsed into our kitchen.
Pinnacle didn’t come out to check the damage until the next day and we were unable to use the kitchen or any electronics near it as we were afraid of the electrical damage. They fixed it over the next few days and did a good job but we lost several dishes in the damage and the smell of damp was horrible.
After this incident, I started talking to the landlord, Rebecca Lewis Jones, directly. She was very nice and worried about all of us after the accident. She seemed to have lost a lot of faith in Pinnacle after they took so long to stop the leak and if we had any maintenance issues from that point on we went through her. She often replaced things like a broken freezer quickly but only used a single contractor that she trusted, if he was busy it would take weeks to fix something. He was lovely but she wouldn’t always listen to his suggestions, such as adding a better extractor fan in the bathroom. This meant he would repaint over the mould and it would just come back again. She did let us have a cat for a £100 deposit, we had that added into the contract with Pinnacle.
Overall I had a good experience living there but I wouldn’t want to renew due to the cost and the constant mould in the bathroom. Pinnacle took two months of emails and phone calls to get my deposit back but I did get it back in full. Overall the landlord was ok but Pinnacle was a frustrating middleman in the renting.
Rent: £330
Deposit Returned?: Yes