5th Aug 2025 (15 weeks ago)
I wouldn’t even give this agency one star, as they seem to think students are easy targets to scam. My daughter and two of her friends rented a place from them last year, and it was in an awful condition. When we received the keys, the house was dirty from top to bottom — the toilet even had human waste in it. The bathroom was mouldy, and the kitchen counter, cooker, and extractor fan were greasy. There were also significant damp issues in the living room.
We took photos and contacted Townsend before the girls actually moved in. In response, Townsend told my daughter and her friends that the house had been professionally cleaned, but when we came back, we saw that very little had changed. My daughter and her friends ended up cleaning the property themselves just to make it liveable. We even had to purchase a new lampshade for my daughter’s room because the old one was covered in dust, and she suffers from allergies.The damp issue in the living room was never resolved, but the girls made the house more livable and turned it into a home.
We noticed that whenever a problem with the property arose, despite many email conversations, Townsend were very reluctant to act and their responses were extremely slow. For example, the garden fence fell down in November 2024, and the next-door neighbour was very aggressive about it. Yet, Townsend couldn’t get anyone to fix it before January 2025.
When the girls decided to move into different accommodation, they left the property much cleaner than it had been when they received it. They expected to receive the deposit within 8 days of returning the keys to Townsend. However, Townsend came up with an excuse, claiming to have found crumbs on the kitchen counter and a single strand of hair, and told the girls they would each be charged £90 for professional cleaning.
When we shared the before-and-after photos, Townsend still insisted on charging the amount and is continuing to withhold the deposit to this day. After reading some of the other reviews here, it’s clear that they particularly target students and impose extortionate cleaning charges with no evidence to justify them.
Furthermore, the check-in and check-out reports of the property are not comparable, as the former report is very general whilst the latter was very specific. For Townsend to use photos of dirty areas at check out as proof that the property had been left in a worse condition to when the tenants moved in, they would need to show the same area spotless, at check in - no such photos exist. The unclean areas indicated at check out will have been in this state since before the tenancy started.
Further to Townsend's rebuttal, I have included some of the original photos taken immediately after the "professional" cleaning.... Read more