You’re a student and chances are you’re living in a slightly mouldy semi detached house somewhere in Brighton or its surrounding areas, and suddenly the bathroom light won’t stop flickering or the fridge feels a little er, not cold. Naturally you pick up the phone to contact your landlord or rental agency. Your landlord who may I add is probably making well over five-hundred quid a month off you living in their hand-me-down room, and times that by 3 or 4 or 5 depending on how many housemates you have. Anywho, alas they don’t answer or they say they’ll send ‘someone’ round to ‘look at it’ at some point in the near future. Better yet you contact your rental agency and they say they’ll ‘let the landlord know’ and then you have to wait for whatever comes of that.
Maybe it’s just me but does it ever feel as though you’re bothering them? The people we pay to give us a service and whenever we need it they make you feel as though you’ve contacted them the day of their mothers funeral asking where the hoover is.
There is an indefinite air of blasé bluntness to the way landlords treat their student tenants and same goes for the rental agencies we deal with. I’ve experienced it myself and seen many fellow students endure housing related horror stories through no fault of their own. This article will recount some of the more glamorously appalling but all too common stories that have occurred in Brighton.
Firstly, we have Charlotte who at the time had just finished her second year of Uni at Sussex and was nearing the end of her second year tenancy. Throughout her tenancy (which cost £650 a month, something her student loan barely covered) her and her 3 housemates had issues with the bathroom.
“It was getting black mould very, very easily. The drains were blocking really easily and there was a weird smell coming from the drains. It made it very difficult to clean because then the water wasn’t draining properly after our showers… we’d made our landlord aware several times”.
So, Charlotte’s landlady decided that it was indeed time to give the bathroom a bit of TLC. She organised for builders to come and replace the house’s bath with a brand new shower, and booked the project to begin just 3 weeks before Charlotte’s tenancy was due to finish. There are several issues with this including that not only does it demonstrates the landlords disregard of tenants issues with the bathroom throughout the larger portion of their time there, it also left Charlotte without a bathroom.
She explains that while two of her housemates had gone to stay at their family homes for the summer, she and another housemate stayed in Brighton working. The two tenants living back home preemptively agreed to the work in the house being done, meanwhile, Charlotte and the other person who both worked night shifts at the time in the hospitality sector spent many sleepless mornings listening to the builders chip away.
There’s nothing like waking up slightly sweaty in the hot summer after a night surrounded by spilling pints and plates of various foods to the sound of builders, and oh did I mention they had no place to shower?
As a ‘solution’ to this problem bestowed upon contractual paying tenants the landlady gave the two students (in Charlotte’s words) “keys to her other property that wasn’t currently occupied… [so we had to] walk 20 mins to another house every time we wanted a shower which was horrific because then by the time we had showered and walked back to our house we were already sweaty and warm again”.
When asked what her rental agency Coapt, did to help this situation Charlotte replied “they said it was a problem with the landlady not them”.
Next we have James, who last year around this time met a nice group of boys off Facebook to rent a house with.
In his words they all “went to a few viewings together before settling for a really nice house. We paid for the deposit and signed all of the tenancy agreements in around April time, set to move in on September 7th.”
Suddenly though, around July, he receives a call “out of nowhere” from the rental agency, Harringtons (who they had secured the house through). The landlord had pulled out. The group’s plans were shot and they had about 7 weeks to find a place to live before the new Uni year began. James says he’s still unsure if what happened was even legal as all the documents required to rent a house had been signed.
It was impossible for the group of lads to find a place together in such a short space of time and James ended up renting a room in a house that was advertised to him as being “a mix of students and working professionals”. Instead, he describes the place as dodgy and chalks up the whole thing to be a traumatic experience as he had to deal with 30 something year old people stealing his food and bringing bed bugs into the house.
Numerous other stories were shared with me during my research for this article, the most common was to do with landlords ignoring calls to rectify large patches of mould in students’ bedrooms that are causing many of them health problems.
How all these unsettling and potentially dangerous events continually and not uncommonly happen to students is what is most concerning. Personally, I believe a large part of it is to do with the perceived vulnerability of student renters. The median age of landlords in the UK is 58 as well as this, 48% of landlords are unwilling to let to students. We are a demographic who lack options in the rental market and are looked down upon by landlords and rental agencies who use our lack of experience in this area to pull fast ones on us that can range from having minimum effects on our lives all the way to outrageous ones.
