Pickwick Estates

We bought our flat through Pickwicks, staff including Paolo started off charming and helpful but things went significantly downhill as the proceedings progressed and our solicitor carried out due diligence — there were a number of things that had to be sorted before we could exchange, nothing extraordinary but Paolo panicked that his client was getting impatient and took it out on us and our solicitor — by sending an incredibly rude and unprofessional email to our solicitor, copying us in. He also used the age old, frankly embarrassing «scare tactics» that there was another buyer waiting in the wings, this was after we’d already spent hundreds of pounds on surveys etc, had our deposit ready in our debit accounts etc and were simply following the buying process. In the end the sale completed and we are happy home owners, but we breathed a sigh of relief that we would never have anything to do with these rude incompetent estate agents.

Pickwick Estates showed me a modern flat with turd streaks in the toilet basin. The house was beautiful online, of course, but absolutely rank in person. Apparently the previous tenants did not clean the entire time they resided there. Unfortunately, that was all too evident during the visit. There were used house shoes on the floor, rotting bread in the refrigerator, futile fresh scent plug ins everywhere and intense limescale and bathing grime all over the shower. The place itself was breathtaking underneath the two foot layer of visible toe grease funk.
Maybe because I’m an OCD clean freak, or because I’m just a general freak, I can’t bring myself to trust an estate agent who doesn’t prepare to clean the house before viewings. Paolo, the agent who did the viewing was awesome, he was the nicest guy ever. I absolutely loved chatting with him about hangovers, but unless he slipped something into my whisky I wouldn’t rent a home from him. Oh, and the most classic part about this situation was that his excuse for the state of the flat was because they ‘don’t even bother cleaning the place up until just before the tenants move in, otherwise there would be a layer of dust accumulating while the place waits to get occupied’. B.S. 5000.
**The service was excellent, Paolo is really cool. Would have given it a four star rating if the place was clean.