R Stanley Laird & Co

Dont even know where to begin! Viewed a property with this estate agents that was midst renovation in july 2005! The house looked like it was coming along nicely and was going to be amazing!, paid a deposit and october was the agreed moving in date! Perfect for my first day at queens! Wellll, i arrived down in october wirh my four friends to find a shell! The house had no kitchen, the water wasnt running properly, there was an old fridge freezer in the hall! Paint buckets, brushes, dirty cloths everywhere! But we gritted our teeth as the estate agent promised that it would be finished for the monday after! It was! Oh it was! All the rubbish was swept in to corner in our landing area, the kitchen was fitted, fitted in to the living room! The water ran black and dirt and the fridge freezer was somehow now accompanied by a microwave with sausages still in side it! Sausages that looked like they had been found at area 51! anyway, we arranged a meeting with the landlord and expressed our unhappiness and wanted to see if he had another property we could move to! This went down like a led balloon! Two of the girls moved home on the thur, leaving me and the other girl on our own, she left early the following morning and a i was due to depart that night! When i arrived back to my house, the landlord had taken everything from my room, clothes, bed clothes, all my important information that i had with me to enroll in uni for thw first time! Everything! Various phone calls where made, with him telling me to go to the police, nothing would happen! He didnt care! He then tried to bargain with me by sayin if i paid everyones share to get out of the lease he would return my things! Finally at midnight on the same night, i had to drive back to belfast to pay the man anough money to cover another months rent, even though and i want to be very clear, none of us had signed a lease nor where we behind in rent! In fact he owed us 2 weeks rent back if we are being really picky! Neway, he pulled up with my belongs dumped in a trailor that he had been driving about with all day! Also, this is northern ireland, not the tropics, so my belongings where soaked and ruined. But, i got them back! Oh, yea, he also aksed me if i wanted to stay on in the property!!!

At school we were warned away from Lairds due to their history of dodgy dealings but this not stop me stepping foot into their offices every year of university life.
Lairds is an estate agent institution. Every student will have been warned and every student will ignore the hazard because Laird is handy. It’s located in the university area, they have loads of properties and they put all properties and their details on a nicely designed out sheet for all to see.
But that’s the easy part over. After this the torment will begin. The dreaded contract with guarantors signing in front of solicitors is enough to scare any new student into oblivion.
Then you move in and have the viewings that no-​one tells you about. You were out last night, stumbled home, may be semi naked but definitely stinking of booze. It’s 9am and you wakened by an estate agent knocking on your door and entering your room with two bright eyed and busy tailed students. Nightmare.
However, if you have very little to do and fancy a bit of banter, book a viewing and pray to God you get the little man from Southern Ireland. He’s fantastic craic and will leave you with stories from his estate agent past. It’s worth it just for him.

For fear that I was going to subject Laird to stereotyping, I had felt before I went in that this would be a tremendous waste of time. I had seen the office and felt it resembled an estate agents which would not be of great help or professionalism to us.
And (swallowing hard) it turned out I was very wrong.
Yes, sorry to all of my fans but I am someone who has gotten something wrong once before.
They agreed to let us view houses within an hour of booking the appointments, and they let us roam around the houses at our own leisure, rather than trying to force their sales pitch down our throats.
The only problem is that the office is quite slow. For a place that has such a remarkable turnover of houses, it seems to be a bit too laid back which does not fill me or many other people with remarkable confidence.
In saying that, I am pleased we stepped in to see what houses they had on offer, and I will update this is a year’s time incase there has been any changes!