What I cannot understand is where so many identical contracts are being used by any major agency, why can’t Student Services just publish a summary of the clauses they have problems with and the Agent’s reply. Students could then make their own mind up and Student Services could concentrate on the cornucopia of private landlord agreements?

Furthermore, I would like to bet that very few problems acually arise from the wording of tenancy agreements. Instead I bet more from the actual behaviour of the parties involved.

I wonder which agents students would recommend?!

They left us without a working cooker for 3 months telling us that the only thing we need to cook is a microwave, and when their engineers came to fit the new one, they forgot to actually connect it to the gas; when our central heating broke (which took 9 days to fix) they gave us 2 fan heaters (for a house of 6) and expected that to be sufficient, then came back to pick them up 4 times, and sent us threatening letters demanding their return (when, in fact, they collected them on their second visit). At first they agreed that our mattresses were old and needed replacing, then went and ordered the wrong size, and later refused to replace one of them saying it was “brand new” (they only said this after we complained about something else, and had no problems replacing the other 5 in the same state. I presume the “brand new” mattress they were referring to was the one of the wrong size that they took back). Four of us decided to stay in the same house again, and told Sinclair’s this, but despite this we still had people turn up for appointments to look at the house for next year (despite us having a date for contract resigning set).

They’ve never been pleasant to deal with - from having worked in customer service for 3 years, their phone manner is appalling. As the article quite rightly points out, the University warn against Sinclair’s contracts, however Sinclair’s will not even *give* you a contract to look at until you’ve paid the deposit and we were told that they “don’t change contracts” even if we had advice from the University to do so.

Sinclair’s obviously treat students as lesser citizens. The best advice we found for getting Sinclair’s to do something is to get our parents’ to ring up and threaten them, which worked without fail. The fact that they listen to our parents when we ourselves are the ones paying them, and are adults at 18+ just shows how little regard they hold us in.

I learnt the hard way not to trust Sinclairs, and fortunately next year I’m not making that same mistake again.