Student Accommodation – A Couple Of Things To Watch Out For When Looking For A House
I have been renting my student property for six weeks now. It is the first time that I have lived away from home in private student housing after previously living in halls. I know many of my friends that love their student flat and after seeing their homes I feel quite anxious.
I have to say that my housemates and myself have no one else to point the finger at about our student house apart from us. We were quite inactive in starting our search for a house and left it to the last minute and therefore signed our student accommodation in a dash as we thought that we would otherwise not have anywhere to live.
The student property we signed seemed quite nice at first. Don’t get me wrong it wasn’t the best place we had seen and not the worst, well at the beginning. The building was average, the dimensions of the rooms was acceptable, but as soon as we moved in everything just began breaking or just falling apart. Like I said before we have only been living in our student house for a couple of weeks now but have encountered soo many issues and our landlord just does not do anything about them. If he does try to sort something out it takes hours and hours if not months and even then the problem is most of the time not even solved.
We have been to see representatives within the university about how to go about our issues with our student property. We have taken the contract in and a legal advisor within the university has told us that we have a good case to take our landlord to court for providing such a poor and insufficient level of housing.
We have had no working freezer, a faulty microwave that looks as if it is older than myself. An oven that is unusable, as it smells of burring rubber. Only one out of three hobs function, which is not good when you live in a house of eight. We did start with two showers but one has broken so all of us share just one shower. The central heating has stopped working so it is colder in our house than it is outside, there is damp in pretty much every room, mould on the walls, broken chairs and a large draft that comes through the delicate front door that does not lend itself to safety. How is our landlord able to get away with providing us such a bad quality of student accommodation? I must note that none of these issues have yet been sorted out, replaced or resolved.
When you are looking for your student accommodation, do not rush, just remember that there are more properties than students need, so take your time and make sure you are well informed and go with a reliable landlord.
