Danijela Topalovic
My excitement at moving into a student house this September was palpable. I was ready to rectify my previous academic inadequacies, but I also had this rather inspiring image of myself becoming an independent domestic goddess.
This was my time I thought; an actual house where I could put all those years of watching How Clean is your House? to good use and to prove I could deal with grown up stuff like paying for the TV license. But instead I spent most of the first month battling with lazy and arrogant landlords who I have come to realise are programmed to perpetually lie.
By now you have all probably heard the horror stories from older students, or experienced the mayhem yourselves: “We have cockroaches”, “Mice eat all of our food” and the most recent one I have come across is “We have so much damp in the house, we’ve now inherited pet slugs in the living room.” You sympathise and offer some seriously inadequate advice, but internally you think to yourself that the person is a complete twat. Who would move into a house with infestations and damp? As a potential tenant you endeavour to find a house in the best location with excellent amenities. However, recently I have unexpectedly been left with a sense of empathy for all those students who think they have done everything right but end up living somewhere where their main line of thought is directed at ‘what could go wrong now?’
The problem lies in the fact that we are expected to find a house in January and then hurriedly sign a tenancy agreement. There is no way of knowing what could go wrong with the house before September; at least with Halls of Residence you are guaranteed a certain standard of housing, whereas with student properties the swap-over period from an old tenancy agreement to a new one is a mere few days. This means there is barely any time for the paint to dry before we take over from last year’s students, never mind a time frame for major maintenance works to take place. Current tenancy contracts that Manchester Student Homes approve allow this practise to continue.
When I moved into my house the boiler was broken, which meant no heating or hot water for two weeks, and after ten days of repeated attempts to fix the boiler which the engineer himself admitted was a useless task, the decision was made to replace it. During this interim period I happened to complain to the agency that the house was extremely cold and I was met with the response that I should plug in electric heaters. Yes, fine, a very costly replacement but it would have at least kept me warm. But this was made impossible by the fact that most of the electrical sockets in the house did not work. There was also a wall of damp which needed replastering two weeks into the tenancy contract and a multitude of other less serious problems. Coupled with bedroom locks that did not work, a shower rail that kept falling on me and a crazy ex-Spanish tenant trying to get in with his old set of keys and you have a bit of a nightmare. Then imagine a Carbon Monoxide Alarm going off at 3am on a Sunday morning and not being able to contact your landlord until Monday; numerous voicemails, a formal letter of complaint and calls to the maintenance team were not enough to rouse even an ounce of concern from the landlord. Rather than question our well being and the possibility of a gas/carbon monoxide leak, there was a preoccupation with whether the emergency engineer would charge for the call-out. Moreover, most of these problems were only resolved after weeks upon weeks of constant nagging, visits to the office and an abundance of angry phone calls; something which as paying tenants we should not have to do. Encounters such as these are also not conducive to a good tenant and landlord relationship which contracts subsequently state is a must.
Landlords of student housing need strict regulation; time and time again they breach the health and safety clause of the contracts they agree to adhere to, and it is not acceptable. Students are not slobs; we are equal members of society and therefore we should be presented with the same respect that other paying tenants all over the country are afforded. There is no reprieve for bad student housing; it can affect your whole academic year and is an affirmation of the lack of regard for students in the property market. Landlords need to remember to not bite the hand that feeds them; without students they would not be where they are today.
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