Quite simply the worst company I've ever had the misfortune to deal with…read more
Having already shown us around one property, offered it to us, only to then contact us the next day to say that we were never eligible to live there (it was only available to families, not sharers, which information Goadsby had from the offset), they then proceeded with a lengthy course of bullying, harassment and unfulfilled promises.
We were shown around another property a few days later, which we were happy to accept pending the usual relevant information (rent, deposit, moving in date etc). Goadsby gave us false information about both the rent and the deposit due (which we didn't find out until later). A couple of days later we were presented with an array of documents asking for: A fee of £114 per person for them to check our references, non-refundable (in their own words) if FOR ANY REASON the deal should fall through. Such reasons presumably including Goadsby not fulfilling their end of the agreement, or maybe just fancying showing 20 different groups of people around one property and then keeping 19 sets of deposits. Who knows?
Reference request forms were then posted to the references we had provided (taking three days to arrive), containing a pre-paid envelope for returning said references, and instructions explicitly stating that only written references returned in the post would be accepted. Every single one of our referees wrote a reference and sent it back the day they received it, and every single one of them received a telephone call the next day berating them for not having yet returned the references, and when they politely explained the situation they were told that they should have emailed to save time, in spite of the aforementioned instructions and the fact that no email address was provided.
We were also asked to sign a waiver allowing them full access to our bank accounts (with us incurring any costs the bank might charge for this service), which we reluctantly did. A couple of days after this, we were contacted by Goadsby asking why we hadn't provided them with 6 months' back copies of each of our bank statements (which was never asked for in any of the documents). Again, feeling very uneasy about this, we complied, as by this time we'd already invested several hundred non-refundable pounds. The day after I'd sent my statements, I got another email asking me where they were.
Having rushed to get all this information and money to Goadsby, apologised to our friends and work colleagues for the way they'd been treated, and been coerced into making decisions against our better judgement, there then followed several days of total silence from their end. Silence which continued, in fact, until the day before the prospective moving-in date (and, more pertinently, the date on which we had to leave our current house). At about 9.30 that morning we received an email saying that the deal had gone through, and that we had until 5 p.m. to send a month's rent, the deposit (neither of which were the originally agreed sums), a transaction fee and - with no trace of irony - a holding fee to prevent them from offering the house to anyone else. Three of us were able to transfer the money promptly, but one has no access to his online bank from work and was subjected to a series of increasingly nasty and threatening communications throughout the day.
We managed to get the money across, and were invited into their office to sign the tenancy agreement on the morning of the move. Which tenancy agreement lists one of the residents, for no discernible reason, as a 'permitted occupant' rather than a 'tenant', which is still making it very difficult to convince various authorities of his legitimacy at the address. Oh, and the two obligations which Goadsby had to fulfil, based on their own contract? One: To show us a copy of the gas and electricity safety statements before we moved in (nope) and two: to provide us with a mock tenancy agreement to look over in advance of seeing the real one, which, when I asked them about it, they just laughed.
