How Is This For Scam...
 

As some of you know I am looking for a flat in London - I found this place that looked good - Not a bad price etc...

I have a deposit and can do 6 months in advance rent - You would have thought any landlord would have been happy? - NO.....

I was asked to fill in an application and the fee is $200 - So if they say no I lose the $200!..

I wonder how many $200's they get with zero places to rent?....

OMG!..

watch out for this one:

Bogus letting agents rent through Airbnb to fleece would-be tenants | Money | The Guardian

Surely that's not legal

that is funny shit

I'm in the same boat, its a total scam. we even refused to apply for one property as it had been on the market for weeks and loads of people had already been turned down .. easy money for someone there.

I had a very similar situation... it is fucked up.

My Rule number 1 in life - If someone can fuck you, they probably will...
:(

I have had enough - 6 Months hard work in Spain and back to plan 'A' - Do you remember what that was?..

Is this due to the new rules where they have to check if your 'legal' or not.

It may not be a scam.

It may be that it costs £200 to check you out.

A bit like if you rent a shop, you have to pay (it was about £20) to contact your bank to see if your real.

Well the new rules may be that they have to check you out and pay a fee.

Yes. When we spoke about costs on the phone and you said was that a day or a week, and I said a day, it dawned on me later that its still less than a room at a travel lodge for a luxury 2 bedroom fully furnished apartment with EVERYTHING supplied... Cheap as chips :)

You go! I would but I cant :)

EDIT: Unless you mean moving to Teignmouth lol

Harlow 8char

I know a few models who live in London.

They live on the river on a barge.

It tends to be vastly cheaper.

Lovely place .... Now that I'm gone from there :)

:1orglaugh

Where are you now?

There, I fixed that for you.

Wow

that was very witty

gosh

i just phoned 999 as my sides split

I used to date a woman who worked for a large apartment management company. They too charged an application fee, but I think it was closer to $40. Their policy was that they accepted applications up until the moment someone signed a lease on the place. She said they would often get 30 or more applicants and only have a couple of open units. Those units would be filled pretty quickly so they never even bothered to run a credit check or anything on many of the applicants. What was shitty is that someone would apply and be accepted. They might then come in the next day to sign the lease. If another applicant came in after that person accepted the place, but before they signed the lease, they would take the application even knowing there was a 99.9% chance that the person would not get the place.

She told me the company (which managed several large complexes) made a lot of money just from application fees and her boss would bitch at them if they were bringing in too few applications.

Norwich at the moment but technically I'm homeless!
This scam that Eddy highlighted has made it REALLY hard to rent somewhere new. You have to really research a new property to find out your chances of getting accepted by the landlord - technically DVT is right about the charge but the charge is vastly different between estate agents which shows just how much of a scam it is and even if you pass the checks the landlord can still say no for whatever reason they like and you've lost the money, Estate agents have even warned us not to apply for certain properties because we have a small child and we'll pass the checks but the landlord would refuse us for having a toddler!
Its a very hard situation - jump in and risk losing hundreds per day or delay and the property goes quickly!

Nice scam they got going, criminals going under the radar. They are stealing money, no doubt about it.

Is it nice over there? The closest I went to Norwich was a day visit to Great Yarmouth as a child (nice beach)

This situation sounds like it's getting out of hand. I've been in the same house for about 7 years, so I'm not up to date with this. Are you dependent on the Norwich location or can you move anywhere in the UK? If you're income is purely from the Internet there are some great places you can move, where most people can't go as they're not close enough to jobs. In these type of locations it's easy to find somewhere to rent as there are houses left empty; landlords can't be too picky.

By the way, was the fee $200 (about £110) or £200?

The other question is, is the problem also because you have (I presume) not been in the UK for a few years?

It would be interesting to know if this is now going to be the set fee landlords charge.

$200 sounds a bit excessive, though $20 I think is fair, filters out idiots who just waste your time... though I think it should be refundable, if renter backs out, they lose deposit, if landlord backs out they should return the deposit... otherwise it's wide open to scams, very easy to collect bunch of applications and collect few thousand bucks for free... you could even probably make more from applications than actually renting out the place...:1orglaugh

anywhere between £80 to £220 and that's just for the first person, if you are a couple then its more!