Student Accommodation

I have been letting my student property for nine months now. It is the very first time that I have lived in private student housing after previously living in halls. I know many of my friends that love their student house and after seeing their homes I feel quite jealous. 

I have to say that my flatmates and myself have no one else to blame about our student house apart from ourselves. We were quite lazy in beginning our search for a suitable house and left it to the last minute and therefore signed our student accommodation in a dash as we thought that we would otherwise not have anywhere to live.

The student property we signed seemed quite nice at first. Don’t get me wrong it wasn’t the best place we had seen and not the worst, well at the beginning. The building was okay, the size of the rooms was acceptable, but as soon as we moved in everything just began breaking or just falling apart. Like I said before we have only been living in our student house for a couple of months now but have come across soo many problems and our landlord just does not do anything about them. If he does try to rectify something it takes days and days if not months and even then the problem is most of the time not even sorted.

We have been to see advisors within the university about how to go about our problems with our student property. We have taken the short-hold letting agreement in and a legal advisor within the university has told us that we have a worthy case to take our landlord to court for providing such a nasty and insufficient level of housing.

We have had no functioning freezer, a broken microwave that looks as if it is older than me. An oven that is unusable, as it smells of burring rubber. Only two out of three hobs work, which is not ideal when you live in a house of eight. We did start with two showers but one has become faulty so all of us share only one shower. The central heating has stopped working so it is a lower temperature in our house than it is outside, there is damp in almost every room, mould on the walls, broken chairs and a large draft that comes through the delicate front door that does not lend itself to safety. How is our landlord able to get away with providing us such a poor quality of student accommodation? I must note that none of these issues have yet been amended, replaced or resolved.

When you are looking for your student accommodation, do not race, just remember that there are more properties than students need, so take your time and make sure you are well informed and go with a reputable landlord.