Leaders Reigate - Letting & Estate Agents

Horrendous.

My wife and I lived in a "fully managed" Leaders property for nearly 18 months. Letting the property was harmless enough but once they had your money they did not care.

Damp was left untreated for months eventually leading to rotting brickwork.

On a property visit by a Leaders staff member, our door was left open all day invalidating our insurance and leaving ourselves vulnerable to theft.

The final straw was when the toilet broke and flooded into the downstairs kitchen (previously the shower/bath had flooded too) we were left without a toilet for 5 days despite my wife being six months pregnant.

If you can - avoid

The ladies at Leaders Reigate have been absolutely brilliant throughout our whole process. I had a lot of questions as I am fairly new to the renting market but nothing was too much trouble for them. I was pleasantly surprised by how good the service was. Big thanks to the team!

Leaders in Reigate provided an excellent service when we rented a property through them recently. They were easily contactable and were always happy to help with a cheerful and friendly manner. It certainly made the whole business of property rental a much smoother process. Thank you for all your help!

All was fine with Leaders when we were searching for a home and whilst living there - our estate agent was polite and helpful, so I cannot fault them on their selling skills.

The issues have come since my boyfriend and I moved out and Leaders failed to inform any of the utility companies supplying this address of our forwarding contact details.

We were chased for Gas and Electric bills for months after moving - despite us paying our share as soon as we were made aware of it (the remaining balance was due to be paid by the new tenant and Leaders/the landlady).

After finally getting this sorted - numerous phone calls later - we thought we had settled everything, until we received an urgent email from our previous Landlady last night with a final warning notice on a water bill.

Again, our details had not been sent on and we were about a week away from being taken to court, despite having never been made aware of this final bill. Fortunately, the new tenant mistakenly opened our post and we were able to explain the error and pay the bill before legal action was taken. Having left the property six months ago, however, we weren't expecting to have to deal with any more payments and were quite shocked to hear of this.

I'd gladly take full responsibility for this had we been informed it was our job to notify the utility companies, but when moving out we were assured this was Leaders' responsibility and were specifically asked for a forwarding address for this reason. Arguably, we should have set up a Royal Mail redirect, but as we were assured this would be sorted and we'd already changed the addresses for all important mail (banks etc) we didn't see a need.

My only advice to Leaders is that in future you don't let the admin work slide. If it is your job to sort utilities, please don't let this slip as it can be very detrimental to tenants (especially if this had become a legal issue). If it is the tenants job, however, please just ensure you make this clear to them when moving, as this was never made clear to us.

I would happily have used Leaders again when I initially moved, but this experience has been stressful and I'd now be very sceptical in case it happened again.

Everyone I dealt with was polite and friendly. Danielle who showed me the properties was a delight and it was lovely for her to remember me every time I came into the office. The process was smooth and easy. Hopefully be in the property for many years but will use Leaders again. Fees are a bit steep but not as much as some other agents.