My tenant who vacated the property last week claims that the holding deposit the agent took of £450 is part of her deposit which is not true the agent has assured me this went towards the first months rent.
Agent gave me a statement of fees rent collected, VAT and their commision for tenant find.
The main deposit has come to me, which I protected and served PI as required.
The tenants solicitor called me today leaving a voice message threatening to take me tribunal which I ignored as we are also in dispute over the main deposit which is protected as the tenants allowed my property to go into disrepair. Over grown, weed, infestation etc.
Strangely when I first told the tenant I was going to make deductions she claims she will go take me to court for disrepair but the one year she stayed she never informed me and now claims she has pictures.
I noticed the disrepairs two months ago and served a s21 taking my pictures as evidence during checkout and then fixed everything over a few days just wondering where I stand in all this.
get evidence from agent of how the 450 was described to tenant (email or letter to tenant on receipt of the 450 or when requested plus written statement from agent of what they verbally told tenant the 450 was for )
On repairs they may have told agent not you- check with agent and get written confirmation they never told agent either about any repairs needed. Also check ALL correspondence with tenant (emails txts written ) for any mention of any repairs needed - if there were any other repairs you correspondended on they might try to misrepresent those to the court as the ones you didn’t do
Double check everything done properly on the s21 even if they aren t currently disputing it (Google ‘shelter s21 invalid’ and go through every possible reason) - you don’t want to be found to have illegally evicted etc
Using the holding deposit toward rent or a security deposit requires the consent of the tenant. If the agent has not obtained that, or has obtained it but not retained the evidence, then they’ve fallen down on the job. You should quickly establish this and then seek legal advice on how to move forward. Conditional fee lawyers only tend to take cases they are confident of winning so I would not ignore it if I were you. I also wouldnt fight it in court unless your solicitor tells you otherwise or the “win bonus” the tenants solicitor gets will make the deposit penalty look like small change.
If you end up having to pay due to agent error, you can use their ombudsman scheme to seek financial redress.