Estate agency - moral issue?!

f1shfingers

Situation:

3 tenants renting a house - all 3 moved out end of 2 year lease. Estate agent/landlord only withheld part of Tenant #3s deposit for 'dirty' bedroom. Tenant #3 took case to PRTB as believed this to be bull! Estate agent submitted an invoice for a cleaning company that had to professionally 'deep clean' the bedroom. Checked documents of said cleaning company on CRO.ie and lo & behold, the estate agent is the registered owner of the cleaning company itself! I'm just wondering is this allowed? Is there little else except poor morals at play?

Surely it's not ethical for the estate agent to own the same cleaning company also? Or am I just hoping to see something that isn't really there?

3DataModem

Common? Yes
Ethical? It depends.

Do you think the agent is lying? Do you think the cleaning wasn't necessary? Or didn't take place at all?

f1shfingers

This is common? Why is this allowed? There is a conflict of opinions - estate agent can provide a huge bill for cleaning to benefit himself, when this amount of cleaning may not be necessary. If this is disputed, the estate agent merely draws attention to the invoice and shows thats what the cleaning company said. Most people wouldn't question it - 'Oh if the cleaning company said this, it must be true' but yet the estate agent is most probably upping the total so that he can pocket the surplus. It's ridiculous.

And yes, I think he was lying. No photos of this extremely dirty bedroom which required a professional deep clean were ever submitted. PRTB have ruled in my favour currently, thankfully.

freelancerTax

common ? i dont know
ethical - no f**ing way, how could you mistake this

the cleaning company (estate agent) obviously has vested interest in reporting the state of the room and costs involved - this should not be allowed

i wonder if he had his own name on the invoice for the cleaning company would people make the same conclusion

Duckjob

What does "deep clean" even mean?

If I got an invoice with that on it, I'd be politely handing it back and asking for an invoice with proper documentation of material costs, along with a detailed list of the specific cleaning jobs that were undertaken and how much labour was involved on each one.

f1shfingers

Don't get me started - the invoice looked amateur at best. I'm not too fussed now about what 'deep clean' was done, as the PRTB have ruled them to give me my deposit back. It's the appeal stage at the moment.

You can be sure that had the estate agent his own name on the cleaning company invoice, there'd be many more people disputing this I imagine. But even a Google search returns no information about said company, yet he is the registered owner on the registered documents for the company. Bet he never thought I'd get that far :P

f1shfingers

I guess what I want to know is, is there any professional body I could report this to, in an attempt to prevent other future tenants getting caught out thinking that X cleaning had to be done to the room when really it's in the vested interest of the scabby E. Agent? Or is this, 'allowed'?