Letting agents

[silverclear]

I'm looking for an agency to let out a flat in Edinburgh and I'd like to make sure they're good to both landlord and tenant. Does anyone have any recommendations of good letting agents, from either perspective, or firms to particularly steer clear of? Thanks folks!

Edit - Thanks everyone for your helpful comments!

Comments

[screwthepast]

We had a lot of trouble with McLean Forth; firstly they advertised the council tax as a band lower than it actually was, and then one of their number took a personal dislike to my fiancé. Their handyman is a nice enough guy, but he was not very good at actually fixing things.

We thought the folk at James Gibb were pretty arrogant overall, but still better than McLean Forth.

[lindsalba]

I've heard of problems with Alba Residentials

[diarytypething]

I've had bad experiences with Alba Residential, and my landlord doesn't find them particularly helpful either. Although the property is supposed to be fully managed, the landlord is always told that she has to arrange any repairs herself - although this is an improvement on the service from a few months ago when they didn't even bother passing on information about work that needed to be done. Their lease contracts don't meet some of the basic legal requirements, they charged my flatmate and I £176 for credit and reference checks they didn't carry out, and none of the promised repair work was carried out before we moved in. One of my work colleagues agreed to be Alba's main contact when one of her relatives rented out a flat through them after moving abroad, and she had a similarly bad experience; eventually it became such a hassle that her relative decided to sell, and one of Alba's agents tried to pressure her into selling it to them at below market rate.

[snowberries]

NEVER use alba. i could write an essay on the problems we had with them, in the end we were forced to leave 3 months early due to rising damp, after them not noticing it and ignoring our reports of it for 3 months. they couldn't find us a like for like flat (ground floor, nice area, space etc), so tried to evict us so the owner could do work on it so we had to get lawyers involved and they still took part of our deposit despite it being spotless, and cleaner than it was when we got it. apparently the shower screen wasn't clean enough, which warranted a £200 "light clean".

this was just the last in a very long list of things they did wrong, they are an absolute joke of a company and the employees are so disrespectful. yet seem to be pretty successful. sorry, i'm bitter!

[whoopdedoo]

Cullen have been decent for us for the last three years, too. We have the world's tightest landlord but Cullen are pretty good at both being a good tenant representative when he's being lousy (most of the time, to be honest) but are also pretty fair, as far as I can tell anyway, to the landlord and try to make sure both sides are happy. It's mostly a if-we-don't-bug-them-they-don't-bug-us kind of relationship, which suits us fine.

[cheekbones3]

Grant Management are supposedly awful.

[henriksdal]

Yes - AVOID GRANT MANAGEMENT

[steel_bonnet]

Thirded.

Had loads of hassle while renting from them- especially difficult if you don't match their definition/expectation of a tenant and so don't fit their standardised forms and checks. Lots of random unexplained admin charges too.

Went horribly wrong from even getting viewings, to getting their agent to turn up to pre-arranged viewings through to getting them to do decent repairs(eventually they got around to "remedying" mould by painting over it!.

EPM were brilliant when I rented from them- but that was 8 years ago.

[lips_of_tragedy]

My parents use Fineholm who seem to be pretty good.