On Strutt & Parker, London estate agents: one client's personal view:

In view of our terrible and upsetting experience after having used Strutt & Parker as estate agents for letting, my appraisal, also submitted to the promotion and reviewing site allagents.co.uk is repeated here.

We'd used Strutt & Parker before for sales, with mixed results. The first time quite satisfactorily and most recently disastrously since they took the property off the market based on false assurances by a purported buyer who pulled out.

Rated below average for the reasons that follow. This is an old-line estate agency with a generally good public reputation. We listed our property with them first for sale, and then for sale or letting. They found a buyer and took the property off the market, assuring us there was 'no doubt' that completion would take place. We dissented at first, but they left it off the PrimeLocation Web site and we didn't argue. Needless to say, at the last minute the buyers had remorse and pulled out. There was no follow-up buyer at an acceptable price anywhere near the original offer (they came up with a speculator supposedly willing to pay £150,000 less, but no guarantee even of that; in practice if an estate agent doesn't line up a valid back-up offer early on a sale is always at risk). So, with the property vacant we pursued a letting and Strutt & Parker's letting staff found a tenant. We provided all documents of ownership, residence, tax status, the tax status of our family company that handles management, repairs, rent receipts. And despite earlier assurances, the day after the tenant moved in S&P said they wanted to withhold 20% tax. In 35 years of letting in Britain nobody has questioned my residence (I have EEA status and have paid UK resident tax for decades) nor that of the company which has been taxed here (and can prove it) since 1980. to my mind, this last-minute hullabaloo smacks of incompetence. ("Oh, sorry, our assurances were a mistake ... blablablah.") No other London estate agent (and we've worked with many, for buying and for letting) has led us up the garden path like this. I will not use them again. It is one thing when a firm and its staff are mistaken on the law, the facts and tax practice. It's even worse when the person charged with administering the funds, in this case Veronica, is (in my humble opinion) a "jobsworth". We were, in the end, paid the rent, but only because I suggested deleting our family company from the transaction. Then there was another wrinkle: how could I prove I owned the property (something the firm ought to have determined in the first place: I told them to go to the Land Registry Web site and pay £3, which they did.) All of this after a day's palaver, with copies of our self-assesment forms for last year (SA-105) and the company's UK tax assessment having no meaning for them. Meanwhile the tenant has had anguish because we had no proof rent had been paid at all. What a waste of a day!

One those firms that seems nice until you are committed to a transaction, and then they discover issues that ought to have been resolved in the beginning. Issues on which I had sent them documentary proofs which they wrote were "OK". Until they weren't OK. And there was "no appeal", no supervisor willing to talk.

A copy of this review was given to the firm for comment and only then did I hear from Andrew Scott who says he founded the firm in 1988. But his attitude was so arrogant and obtuse, so defensive and so uninterested in either facts or law, that we got nowhere. He did not, however, deny anything I said except that his employee (Veronica) who as far as I know has no qualifications for her position, has to be right, well ... because she works for him. Scott's attitude of entitlement (to customers), unwillingness to listen (or to seek proof or disproof of his (wrong) interpretation of tax law, an interpretation shared by no other estate agent nor HMRC (i.e., that a firm incorporated abroad but doing business in the UK and handling funds (I gave American Express as an example) is subject to 20% withholding even though the taxable party (i.e. the landlord) is an UK/EU/EEA/Swiss national resident and taxed in the UK. These are arcane points perhaps, but there is no excuse for stupidity and intransigence when a phone call to HMRC could provide the answer.

Not a nice guy, not someone who deserves my, or your, business when there is so much good competition out there. He thinks highly of himself, of course (he told me that) and it will be interesting to see what, if anything, he writes by way of rebuttal. We've been in the property business in London for 35 years and used agents good and bad, but never one so obtuse, so uninterested in the client. Why do business with a company when the slightest complication leads to argument and, inevitably, mutual insult?

Andy05