Poor service. Very disappointing. Takes advantage of students.
My friends and I rented a property from Space Leeds for the 25/26 academic year. The service and care we received from the team at Space was frankly appalling - made even more ludicrous by the fact that we lived next door to the office! The opening times that they list on their Google page are incorrect as often when we would go round with a query, we would find the shutter to be down on their door. They would take weeks at a time to respond to emails, leaving us with a broken fridge-freezer, a window that would not open on the ground floor and a leaking window in the bathroom for the whole year. They actually asked us to fix the issue with the freezer ourselves by defrosting it with a hairdryer! These were fixed the week before we were due to leave as the new tenants were moving in. Moreover, they would email and say that they were coming round and ask one of us to be in, only for them to not show up. As you can imagine, this was rather disruptive for 5 final year students.
This is nothing compared to the appalling way that we were treated when it came to returning our deposits. We cleaned the house from top to bottom and left it in much better condition than when we arrived. You can imagine our surprise when an automatic cleaning charge of £350 was applied when we vacated the property. When we appealed this, Space admitted that they may be at fault and offered to reduce this to £250. When we appealed this again, we did not receive a response for 3 weeks, despite us all chasing multiple times. After threatening legal action, we received a response which said they were having a problem getting the videos to prove the clean was required. We have to this day never received the videos. This is plainly a plot to take advantage of students who are not aware that automatically charging for cleaning is illegal. After 2 months of Space withholding our deposits (in which we received 4 emails total), we escalated the issue to TDS (the Tenancy Deposit Scheme). It was here we found out that Space was actually lying about how much was due to us, claiming that we had only paid £1250 total deposit when the scheme said we had paid £1500. This is disgusting, and a blatant attempt to take advantage of us as students.
The lack of service that we received while living in the property and the disgraceful way we were treated after we had vacated leads me to post this review to encourage students to not let from this company. Very disappointing.