We are keen to reach out to tenants who have personal tales involving rogue landlords or 'Lets From Hell' which they wish to share with our site visitors.
Your absolute anonymity will be guaranteed. Names will be replaced with false ones, and stories presented so no landlord can identify the author.
If you would like to submit your tale of woe for inclusion on this page please email us with your story to
"Landlord conned me into accepting a 3 year tenancy and promised I could get out of it any time. After 9 months when I wanted to leave I found that wasnt the case. Wasnt easy. Had to do my own advertising to find a replacment and landlord pushed the rent up by £100 a month. No one was interested as the rent was way too high for the area. It took another 3 months before the landlord dropped the rent to a real level so I could get rid of it. My advice is NEVER sign a contract of more than a year else your setting urself up for problems in the future."
JOSH
"Had an issue with a landlord concerning a reservation fee. I was made to pay a £350 fee to reserve what I thought was a guaranteed room in a houseshare. Even though I was only renting a room within a house and not buying, my parents were needed as guarantors which seemed a bit excessive. Despite my parents being unable to use computers and elderly I was expected to have them print out bank statements and sign Adobe forms then scan them back all within the space of a day. Having being unable to provide this my application was cancelled by the landlord and I was supposed to get the £350 admin fee back. This didn't land in my bank account until about 4 weeks later for no apparent reason. The landlord made himself un-contactable and refused to answer calls."
STEVE R
"When viewing the room, the landlord hid holes in the wall by strategically placing the bed in the way, and made sure the room was fully aired out so I could not smell the mold. He then lied about how nice and 'safe' the area was and conned me into paying his £350 reservation fee on the spot via his Paypal app, claiming he had so many people looking at the room today and that if I did not pay right then, the room would be gone in an hour.
He stated that the majority of the reservation fee came off my first months rent and provided me with his badly worded / vague application form, which in hindsight I should of walked away from. Only £75 came off my first months rent and he claimed the other £275 as his 'admin fee.' When I complained about the mold, I was told that, "By breathing and sleeping in my room, this would create condensation which in turn creates mold," essentially telling me to stop breathing in my room.
He also claimed that the 'self-replacement' scheme meant that I could leave easily, but all he does is push your rent up if you want to leave and refuses to answer calls or acknowledge any potential tenant you put in touch with him, which makes it close to impossible to leave. If he decides to try process a potential tenant, he will often claim that they fail his 3rd party reference checks, resulting in you having to find a new person.
In reality he does not perform any reference checks as he does not want to deduct from his £275 admin fee. Instead he fails the potential tenants on the basis that he wants tenants to have a guarantor, to be able to lock their parents into his heavily one-sided, horrific 3 year AST contract, so he can go after the parents for more money. When I did eventually move out, he tried to claim a large part of my deposit on the basis that I had paid him late on many occasions. When I questioned this, he provided me with some scrappy log of how he was charging £20 every day my rent was late, and as I had paid on the 1st of every month and not the 31st of the previous month, he thought this entitled him to a large portion of my deposit."
MOLLY