EH
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We have had the same set of tenants in our property for over 20 years. The original agent who found the tenants merged with another agency but they let us down badly about 15 years ago so we found another agency. The handover was fraught, with the agents who we were wanting to change, trying to charge us over £4,000 for lost fees; we had to point out to them that they had not found our tenants for us, so the charge could not be made, so they then made the transfer of the deposit as difficult for us as they could. The agency that we had chosen was eventually taken over in 2014 by yet another Letting Agency who have been as inefficient as all the others; the tenants were already on a rolling contract and had been in the property for 14 years.
Things came to a head recently when we asked for a copy of the Tenancy Agreement, as it was required by our Mortgage lender, since we are re-mortgaging. The agency cost us 4 weeks delay in the mortgage process which has had bad financial implications for us, as we attempted to obtain the Agreement before they finally admitted that it had been lost. We had already missed a deadline by four weeks when we finally got a Supplementary Agreement, which did not even detail what sort of contract it was supplemental to. However, we handed it to the Mortgage lenders who took another 8 weeks to let us know that they wouldn't accept it. They will only accept an AST. At this point we have decided to change agents, and have them draw up a new AST.
Before we go ahead and terminate the contract with the current agency, we want to clarify if they have any legal right to demand compensation for lost fees, when a.) they have been totally incompetent which is the reason we have now decided to find someone new and b.) they don't possess the original contract. c.) they didn't find the tenants. It doesn't seem possible that after all these years they could try to penalise us for terminating a contract due to their lack of service.
I don't think we can deal with yet another problem with them at this time, so I would be very grateful if you could advise us on our client rights. Can we write and terminate the contract while at the same time having the new agent change the bank details for the rent?
When the Supplementary Agreement was set up last month, should we have expected the agent to advise that we change to an AST at that point, since they knew we were applying to re-mortgage?
Many thanks.
