Purple Bricks property management “service”

[AllisonR]

Purple Bricks has been our property manager for several years. Basically, we have paid them their monthly fee to collect the rent check and deposit it, as any time anything has gone wrong with the house, we have had to solve it ourselves. The first time, they left our tenants freezing for days before telling us the boiler needed to be replaced. They didn’t have a contractor to solve the problem so I found someone. They credited back their monthly fee for that one month. More recently (about 6 months ago), they got us a very high bid for solving a quite significant problem. We asked them to get another bid or, preferably, two. They ignored us and when pressed, said all other contractors wanted to charge £125 just to go out and give a bid. I have now solved the problem for a third of what their only bid wanted to charge. So we want to leave and now they tell us there’s a clause in the contract saying if we leave and they’re not in breach, we have to pay them a £500 fee! This seems illegal. Plus, we’ve got much more damage to our house from 6 months of the unrepaired leak. We don’t see how they aren’t responsible for paying for the extra damage caused by their delays.

[ostell]

So read through the contract and see what they have failed to do correctly. Point this out to them and then tell them that you are leaving because of their failures to act according to the contract

[AllisonR]

They are going through the points we have made and saying that they are not obligated to give us a decent price for repairs and they therefore have not breeched the contract!

[ostell]

They gave a duty of care towards yoj

[AllisonR]

They gave a duty of care towards yoj

I don’t understand. You mean they are right that they did all they were required to do?

[ostell]

They have a duty to look after your interests.

[AllisonR]

They say that if they found a contractor, they did all they were required to do. They weren’t required to find a contractor at a competitive price. It doesn’t matter that they were going to charge 4x as much to do the job as what we ended up paying and it doesn’t matter that they weren’t planning (in their bid) to replace the missing roof tile that was the source of the problem!