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We have used West of Exe for both buying a house and renting houses. This is my honest assessment of both. For buying I would give 5 stars, Sally was excellent, showing us around properties and chasing everything up and moving the sale along, we completed very quickly and Sally had no small part to play in this. Thank you Sally. A true asset to West of Exe. Prior to buying our house we rented various properties through West/East of Exe in Exminster and a property in Topsham. I would give the renting process 2 stars at best. I’ll start with the good. The moving in process was efficient with the various checks being completed quickly. On the whole, any complaints raised during the tenancy term were dealt with quickly. We had an oven fixed in our first property very promptly and roof tiles replaced and a new dishwasher fitted in our final property very quickly after raising issues. However, when reporting mould on the ceiling in our first property we were not taken seriously and told to clean it with neat bleach. What I do not rate at all is the end of tenancy process. I have found West of Exe to be inflexible and their requests to be excessive, unnecessary and outside of the terms of the tenancy agreement. Essentially you should be required to return the property to the same state it was let to you in. However, getting your rental deposit back is a difficult and labour intensive process. In our first rental home we were asked to entirely repaint one of the bedrooms (even though they had no idea what the colour on the walls was actually called) before agreeing to return our deposit. If they spot a cobweb you will be asked to go back and remove it. Our last rental home was the worst experience I’ve ever had trying to get our deposit back. It was a high end property with an expensive monthly rent and a large deposit. I have spent countless hours arguing with West of Exe over their excessive requests that I felt were not our responsibility. We were told we had to pay for professional exterior window cleaning despite there being nothing in the contract saying we had to pay for or were even responsible for exterior windows. We went back to rectify cleaning issues on the check out report twice. Finally we were told the landlord was happy with the interior cleaning and then the following week we were told this wasn’t actually the case and they were deducting money from our deposit for additional cleaning. This felt like a joke! They were already showing people around the property at this point, prospective tenants were wondering around with dogs whilst we were cleaning the floors! We were also told they were deducting money from our deposit for emptying the wheelie bins because they were full when we left, even though they were full when we moved in! Plus charges for removing rubbish left in the garage / garden that wasn’t even ours and was there when we arrived! East of Exe even agreed to put the bins out for us after we vacated the property and then didn’t and so tried to charge us! At one point they were trying to charge us for lightbulbs out of our deposit that were not working when we arrived! You can’t make this stuff up! I spent so much time arguing about these charges and they wouldn’t budge on most of them. I suspect because the Landlord decided after we vacated to actually spend some much needed money on the property and wanted us to shoulder some of that financial burden. In the end I took it to the tenancy deposit scheme who agreed with us on all issues other than gardening. We had to pay a contribution towards gardening from our deposit because the adjudicator deemed there was some weeding and hedges that needed attending to and that was our responsibility under the contract. Fair enough. I would recommend to anyone that they take additional photos on check in and on check out so they have their own evidence in addition to the check in / out report done by West of Exe and don’t be afraid to use the tenancy deposit scheme to dispute deductions from your deposit that you feel are unfair.... Read more
1st Sep 2025 (10 mo. ago)