Complaints about letting agents
This content applies to England only.
Housing laws vary between England and Scotland. Get advice relating to Scotland
If you rent privately, you may deal with a letting agent, who looks after the tenancy on behalf of the landlord. If you are not happy with their services, you may be able to complain in a number of ways:
For more information about the rules letting agents should follow, please see the section on letting agents.
Complaining to your landlord
You can contact your landlord to complain about poor behaviour by the letting agent.
Even if you don’t normally deal with them directly, your landlord’s name and address should be on the tenancy agreement or included in other correspondence or documents. If you do not have your landlord’s name and address, ask the agent for them. The agent must tell you if you ask. If your landlord is a company, you can make the agent tell you the names and addresses of all the directors and the secretary.
If, at the end of the complaints procedure you are not happy with the result, or if the landlord has failed to reply to your complaint letter, you may be able to use alternative dispute resolution (ADR) or go to court. Although it is important to bear in mind that going to court may be very expensive.
Complaining to the letting agent
What you should do depends on whether the agent is a member of a professional association or scheme.
A member of a professional association or scheme must have a complaints procedure. Get information from the agent’s website or ask at the agent’s office. They must tell you about it if you ask. If they do not have a complaints procedure or will not tell you about it, contact the professional membership scheme and they will make sure that your complaint is properly dealt with by their member.
An agent that is not a member of a professional organisation or scheme may have a complaints procedure. If so, use it. Ask about the complaints procedure at the agent’s office, or get information from the agent’s website.
If the agent does not seem to have a complaints procedure, or if you cannot get any information about it, complain by letter. The agent may investigate, ask questions, ask you to send copies of documents, and/or inspect your property. Then the agent should write to you to tell you the result.
If at the end of the complaints procedure, you are not happy with the result or if the agent has not replied to your complaint, you can complain to the agent’s professional association or scheme (if there is one), or use alternative dispute resolution (ADR) or go to court.
Complaining to a professional association
There are two main professional associations for letting agents – the National Approved Lettings Scheme (NALS) and the Association of Residential Letting Agents (ARLA). If the agent is a member of one of these schemes you can complain to that association or scheme. But you can only complain if you have already been through the member’s own complaints procedure, and you are not satisfied with the result.
You should write to the relevant association or scheme to explain what your complaint is about, enclosing copies of previous correspondence about the complaint. The association or scheme will deal with your complaint, provided that:
- you have reached the end of the agent’s complaints procedure
- you do not have a court case about your complaint.
If at the end of the complaints procedure, you are not happy with the result, you may be able to use alternative dispute resolution (ADR) or go to court. But if you have agreed an offer or decision about your complaint, then you cannot take it any further.
Complaining to the Property Ombudsman
The Property Ombudsman scheme provides a free, independent service for resolving disputes between letting agents and their customers. Many agents are members - those that are must display the ombudsman's logo on windows, advertising and stationery.
Member agencies must:
- follow the Property Ombudsman Code of Practice
- have agreed to have professional indemnity insurance to ensure that any compensation awarded to you can be paid
- have an in-house complaints system with written procedures
- explain how the ombudsman can help resolve complaints and co-operate with any investigation
- agrees to pay compensation promptly, if the ombudsman awards it and you accept.
The ombudsman can only consider complaints if you have already tried to use the agent's internal complaints procedure but are not happy with the outcome, and you have not started court action against the agent. See the Property Ombudsman website for more information.
