A J Estates

Rented from AJ estates while a student in manchester. The only reason im giving this company 2 stars is because the house itself was actually nice. However, in the garden planks were all rotten and a few fell through. i saw rats running through our gardens on some occasions too. however, the bedrooms were nice and so was the kitchen, bathroom and living room. the kitchen tap broke a few times and no one came to fix it for months. the landlord acted as if we (a house of girls) were being silly regarding our problems with the plumbing, which was abysmal, by the way. the toilet broke a few times, some kind of toxic sludge was coming out our pipes and the tap in the kitchen leaked all over the floor and surfaces constantly and left water damage everywhere. the whole kitchen would be soaked and your feet would get wet (was like walking through a paddling pool). one of the ceilings also swelled with water and it would drip through onto the floorboards. at one point the basement flooded with water and lots of stuff (clothes, suitcases for example) was destroyed from a broken gully on the property. work was needed on the house that was not complete when we moved in. my second main issue with AJ estates is their handling of deposits. firstly they charged us a huge deposit each (£500+) and then at the end of the tenancy took THREE MONTHS to get it back to me, with £200 taken off for general cleaning fees, when our house was barely dirty, by the way. the evidence they sent us of cleaning needed mostly consisted of photos of dust on plug sockets. but the charges on my deposit were supposed to be even more, with them trying to charge me £80 for a bed base that broke from general use. when i contacted them and explained myself multiple times, they took months until they finally asked me for a statement on the bed. then, FINALLY, the £80 charge was dropped. abysmal company that will do anything to get ahold of your money. they even used to charge £5 for them taking the bin out, but the thing is they’d come super early to do so when the bin men wouldn’t come until midday. they did this a lot and were obviously having a great time charging everyone on our side of the street £5. there is much more i could say. but in conclusion: lovely house, bad company. also, there seems to be many fake 5 star reviews on here about them, so take that as a red flag.

No compassion or consideration after one tenant was diagnosed with cancer, they charged admin fees for late payments whilst she was receiving treatment in hospital. This tenant only lived in the house for a few months and still paid full rent for a year. The estate agents refused to offer any help at all. Refused to return the deposit until we provided the final bill from United Utilities (which did not exist because of an error by United Utilities). Staff too lazy to make one phone call to United Utilities which delayed deposit payment by months. House was kept in perfect condition but charges were still added for forgetting bin day, and minimal wear and tear around the house. Terrible company that takes advantage of vulnerable students and adds charges wherever possible.

I wish that I could give 0 stars because honestly 1 is too much. I rented a room in property for 6 months from them, and little did I know basically signed away all my rights because it was an 'agreed sublet' this was absolutely my fault, but my only one. When I moved in the house was ~ok~ The conservatory leaked in to what was our 'lounge area' soaking the carpet and everything in there. They sent someone round who basically just sealed it a bit and it continued to leak. When I moved in the bathroom was an absolute disgrace (not to the fault of the current tenants) it was just absolutely covered in mould. Having previous experience and illness due to mould I contacted them and they outright refused to do anything about it. So I cleaned the mould myself And it came up quite nicely. I also replaced the mouldy disgusting health hazard of a shower curtain with a brand new one. When we moved out one of the charges taken from our deposit was £20 for replacing the shower curtain?! Myself and my housemates had most of our deposits taken away despite the house being left in good, clean condition. I've been renting in Manchester for 6 years and they are the only time I've ever had a single penny taken from my deposit. They added on charges for a cleaner and when I disputed them came back with something like "oh well it only works out to £4 per person" - not the point the house was clean and did not require professional cleaning. I could go on for days but my final and probably most serious issue with them is that following moving out they were only contactable by email. Every single time I contacted them they would wait exactly 28 days to reply which is the legal limit for how long they have - so basically I was getting one reply a month to my queries and only had 3 months to dispute the deposit. Due to this after 3 months of trying to resolve disputes myself and my housemates ended up having to cash what was left of the deposit because we were all strapped for cash. I have spoken to several estate agents about these matters since this occured (2017) of whom a agreed that their behaviour is absolutely disgusting. There are so many more things I could say to about my experience with them. All I can say is avoid at all costs or at the very least be EXTREMELY careful. (Also there's a reason all of the reviews here are either 1 or 5 star - as they have rated themselves 5 stars on the first review I would hazard a guess that the other '5 star reviews' aren't actually genuine but that's just my speculation...)

I used AJ Estates for my second year student housing. What a mistake! The house we lived in only had single glazed windows, and my radiator was faulty, which led to freezing temperatures in Winter. I spoke to someone from AJ Estates about this, only for them to tell me that this was 'normal', and was a regular occurence in 'most houses'. They did NOT give us 24 hours notice multiple times before other people viewed our house, which was against the tenancy agreement. To add insult to injury, at the end of the year, it was a complicated process to obtain our deposit, and we were charged excessive amounts of money for faults that were already in the house when we moved in. We were charged almost £60 for the cleaning of an oven that my housemate claimed to have cleaned just before we moved out. Now that I have moved into a new house with a different estate agents, I can see just how bad AJ Estates were, and would advise people to stay away!