While the campus housing situation certainly has a lot of issues around ‘West Slope’ development in particular, the private sector is far more marred with ridiculous stories of the problems students have trying to rent in Brighton. While we all suffer from inflated prices and highly dubious deductions from our deposits, there is still some kind of standard, isn’t there? Surely it’s not too much to ask for, and it should be relatively simple, to rent a structurally sound, fully built dwelling from a reasonably competent lettings agent? Depending on your luck, the answer is probably: Yeah-fucking-right! That certainly seems to be the case with those unfortunate tenants of the sadly prevalent NGB Lettings. With an astounding 2.7 stars on Google and 1.7 stars on Estate Agents review site allagents.co.uk at the time of writing, NGB really stands out from the crowd as the royalty of the shitshow that is student lettings. Some of us may be blessed with such godsends as relaxed landlords, agents who repair damage in a reasonable timescale and even fully functioning amenities, but not NGB tenants! As one Google reviewer put it:
“To be frankly honest NGB Has no quality in being a service industry at all. Not sure if all the five stars people won a jackpot from NGB or just their own staffs. From my experience, they do not repair any damage, the disgusting quality of the property is something I've never seen ever (before you move in)! AVOID if you have to jump off a building!”
The sentiment this review leaves is reiterated by a number of students, living in properties managed or advertised by NGB, who have spoken to Brick. The story of one person who had a number of issues in their property, as seems to be the theme, is fairly standard in slack management terms. This tenant began living in a property with some standard problems, such as having to spend “a couple of months contacting different companies to end the previous tenant’s electricity & broadband contracts”. This was after moving into a poorly cleaned house and spending the first four months of the tenancy with one shower out of action leaving a single shower working in a house for six people. On top of this, the apparently “properly managed” (as quoted from NGB's website) property had two showers that leaked through a ceiling into a downstairs bedroom. With such a high level of maintenance from an “experienced” management team, who wouldn’t want to rent from them? Obviously, such competent property managers would fulfill their promise of having the place professionally cleaned before tenants moved in, wouldn’t they? I guess not. Apparently, after this whole debacle, the drains in the back garden began to leak sewage. Allegedly, NGB blamed the tenants for the blockages and recommended a private contractor, who would have charged the tenants a fee for clearing the waste. The tenants called Southern Water rather than forking out money they couldn’t afford, being students, and Southern Water cleaned up the sewage for free, as this is not something most plumbers are equipped to deal with. They informed the tenants this had happened before with the previous residents, conflicting with the evidently false story of NGB Lettings. The choice of how to interpret NGB at this point is a rather dire one: incompetence or corruption? Either they simply did not know Southern Water are responsible for drains maintenance - which seems ridiculous for a company with “years of experience” managing properties to not know - or they are totally reckless in their supposed “service” provided to help tenants solve problems, possibly even taking advantage of people desperate for their garden to not be filled with shit.
Another tenant of an NGB Letting spoke to us with an even more eye-opening insight into the company’s targeted market strategy. An international student, this individual came to NGB with “a mix bag of Asian roommates in tow”. With no question or query, the agent showing them to the property repeatedly mentioned the company’s speciality of catering for “Chinese International Students”, without any prompting into a conversation related to this. The rest was put simply by the tenant when talking to Brick:
“Our naive asses bought into the facade of maternal care they seemingly provided and handed over that fat deposit. What followed next was empty silence of a month which only ended when I made a call to ask for follow ups from the multiple emails sent before, only to be told that surprise! our house was being sold and we were essentially, houseless…. According to them, the selling of our prospective property was ‘so recent that they didn’t have the opportunity to contact us’”
NGB’s answer to this absurd scenario was to offer the group another, far more expensive property, with none of their preferred specifications, in a “take it or leave it” fashion. With reasonable concern that they would find no better property as it was April when this happened, the tenants took the offer in these dubious circumstances which illustrate the vulnerable position students are in at the hands of the lettings agents and landlords in Brighton, a city already in a housing crisis where rents have risen almost four times as fast as wages since 2011. While the benefit of the doubt can be given, who is it that benefits in these situations which cause many students so much grief and financial difficulty? Some honest small businesses, sure, but for the most part it is the already well-rewarded estate and lettings agents who leech of people’s basic need to have somewhere to stay. If a good quality service, some kind of value for money, and a level of transparency was what you found when renting as a student, or anyone else for that matter, you might think it was alright. But that isn’t what the majority of people find, and the captive market that is the student populace in this densely populated area suffer at the hands of many, not all perhaps, of those who they rent from. Meanwhile, the locals are ever more resentful of the students who are contributing to increased pressure on the housing “market”.
The above-mentioned tenant suffered a great deal of stress and was left questioning the morality of businesses so openly targeting vulnerable international students. It is well known among the student populace that international students tend to be less well versed in English housing law than their English counterparts (did it even need to be said?) and those from outside the EU are evidently targeted to be tenants as there seems to be an idea that they are a) wealthy and b) less knowledgeable of the law. When it comes to issues with your tenancy, those with family who have dealt with this in England have a safety net of experience, and those coming from abroad generally do not. Based on the encounter described here, NGB Lettings is an offender of these unpleasant, unethical, and racist practices. This highlights the numerous problems students face with dodgy landlords, who think it is okay to leave people living in almost squalid conditions and avoiding communication to avoid paying out to solve problems, as another tenant told us. The stories of NGB never seem to end. This final tenant told Brick of “mould so bad I think it is affecting my health”, an extractor fan which was not fixed for five months in a windowless bathroom (which therefore falls short of housing regulation), an oven which didn’t work and a window bolted shut for five months, all after paying fees months in advance because NGB allegedly “like to get work done in a staggered fashion”. Despite having months to prepare the contract, it was not done until a week before the tenancy began, and only at the prompting of the rather distressed tenants who had to scramble for information at the last minute.
All in all the company puts on a pretty poor show. Letting down tenants in this manner does them no favours publicly and we would challenge readers to find any tenant of NGB who had a good word to say about them. It is unsurprising to hear that the property rented by a tenant mentioned above has changed hands from NGB Lettings to a rival company, no doubt due in part to the poor service provided by the company. Letting down vulnerable students after persuading them in such a conniving manner is also simply not on. When finding a place to call home, even for a single year – a hardly insignificant period of time – and spending thousands on this property, you would expect some level of decent service and a reasonably functioning property which will not contain severely unhygienic shortcomings. With NGB Lettings chances are this will not be the case.
Update, November 2020:
As of November 2020, NGB Lettings have, perhaps unsurprisingly, failed to clean up their act. The testimony of a former tenant's fight for compensation makes that clear. They went to ACORN, a national housing union, for help:
My housemate and I got tired of the lack of communication from NGB and turned to ACORN for some advice as to whether we’d be able to get any compensation from NGB. After meeting with ACORN we came to the conclusion that NGB had acted illegally on numerous occasions so we went forward with a campaign against them. We’ve demonstrated outside NGB’s office, had the public sign a petition and had our friends send over a hundred letters to NGB expressing their support for our campaign. They still haven’t contacted us which goes to show that they have no concern for their tenants and no desire to do right by them.
As of present, this ACORN case is still ongoing and more information can be found here.