Ad Hoc Property Management Ltd
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Worth trying for a while but always have an emergency alternative
I am a guardian for Ad Hoc in the north of England and we do not have the problems I have heard of in London as the housing situation is not so desperate and they have to try harder to recruit occupiers. On the other hand that means the licence fee is sometimes not that much lower than a normal rent for a room in a shared house. I have a self contained bedsit which is a very good deal. I am though not happy about the way they avoided telling me that the fee does not include council tax, which it usually does in a guardian property, until I was actually signing the contract. Judging by the demand letters piling up in the hall, I seem to be about the only person in the building who is paying their council tax and I feel that Ad Hoc tacitly colludes in this evasion by not making the situation clear. The main problem with guardianship is that the property owner and the guardian company each see maintenance as the responsibility of the other so neither of them does anything. I have no confidence that anything would get done in an emergency. I also have a gripe about my January direct debit payment failing through no fault of my own, the money was there and my bank could not understand why it had not gone through so obviously there was a problem at their end, but the accounts office wouldn't listen and just treated me like I was trying to get out of paying. I explained to them that 2nd January is also a bank holiday in Scotland where my bank is and the accounts person made that disparaging noise that Londoners always make about Scots. I found this quite objectionable. By the way I have noticed that there are very few guardian properties in Scotland, probably because the tenancy laws there are harder to get around.