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Aston Fox is a letting agents,
based at 196 High Street North, in East Ham, London. E6 2JA. It
is run by shadow director, Mr. Philip Chandler, who is a disqualified director currently owing £325,000 to landlords in rent arrears. You can read more about him in this Government News Network report.
For those who may not know, letting agents find
tenants for rental properties; they manage rent collection and may
provide other services. Letting agents usually negotiate contracts
to manage rented property for a period - often two years. Their
fee for managing the property for this period is often taken out
of the tenants first few rent payments.
Let's Fix Britain provides a Complaints
Service. For a small fee we write a complaint letter and we
did this for our client in. She had engaged Aston Fox to manage her
property - they found a tenant. For a while the tenant's rent was
absorbed by Aston Fox to pay the two year letting fee of £2,444.
However, when that fee was paid Aston Fox passed on only £156.
Since that first and only cheque, four months have passed
and Aston Fox have not paid our client a penny.
Our complaint letter had no effect on Aston Fox
- they didn't even reply to it.
As a follow-on service, we offered to try to recover
the outstanding money from Aston Fox for her, on a no-win, no-fee
basis.
One of the tactics we use is to document and publicise
the conduct of companies who mistreat their customers, and that
is what this article seeks to do. It is, of course, illegal to damage
the reputation of a company or individual by publicising unsubstantiated
claims or lies - and that is as it should be. But it is not illegal
to tell the ugly truth about a company who is mistreating a customer.
That is also - as it should be.
So here, we limit our articles to undisputable
facts. We also offer complaint subjects - in this case Aston Fox
- the opportunity to place their own un-edited comments here.
The central facts are these:
- Aston Fox are not members of any of these professional regulating
bodies:
RICS - Royal Institution of Charters Surveyors
NAEA - National Association of Estate Agents
OEAS - Ombudsman for Estate Agents Scheme
ARLA - Association of Residential Letting Agents
- This means that you cannot take any complaint you may have
about Aston Fox to any of these organisations.
- To date, Aston Fox has taken £2,666 from the tenant
which should have been passed to our client - but was not. At
the time of writing, money has been left unpaid for four months,
causing our client very significant financial problems.
- Our client tried to resolve this issue with Aston Fox on numerous
occasions.
Her contact within Aston Fox - Stephanie - was unavailable to
deal with our client on at least eight occasions. by telephone,
and she did not return our client's calls. On one occasion Stephanie
was unavailable to see our client when she visited Aston Fox
in person.
- In April, Stephanie assured our client that a cheque would
be issued. But it was not.
- In May, we took on the problem for our client. We wrote to
Aston Fox asking them to respond with an explanation of the
delays and a commitment by June 9th. They did not.
- Like our client, I also found great difficulties in speaking
to Stephanie who was very often "not in yet", "out
to lunch", "on the phone", "in a meeting"
or otherwise indisposed. ON one occasion she was dealing with
a bomb scare. My requests for her to call me were usually ignored.
- I did eventually speak to Stephanie who said that the problems
were caused by mal-administration of standing orders. Can this
kind of problem really persist over 4 months?
- I set another deadline for Aston Fox to issue a cheque for
the outstanding money on 29th June, informing us of the cheque's
details. Aston Fox did not respond to this - nor did they meet
the deadline.
- In my earlier call, Stephanie assured me that a cheque for
the full amount outstanding would be issued on July 3rd. It
was not.
- When I wrote to Aston Fox outlining our intentions in recovering
our client's money, Aston Fox referred us to their solicitor
- W.H. Matthews & Co., or 109 Old Street, London EC1 9JR.
Bottom line? Aston Fox have retained our client's
rent money - about £3,000 - without permission nor any good
reason which has caused our client significant problems. Aston Fox
have been evasive and difficult to deal with. They have made promises
then broken them. As at this writing - four months since the problem
arose - they show no signs of returning our client's money.
We are taking other steps to address this.
If you would like to express your opinion of Aston
Fox's conduct to them, please email them at stephanie@astonfox.co.uk
or phone them on their Low-Call number: 0845 223 8220.
UPDATE: Our letter-writing service did not persuade Aston Fox to pay up on this occasion so our client asked us to work on her behalf to recover her money on a no-win, no-fee basis. We worked long and hard, involving several other agencies, and in October of 2006, we recovered all of our client's money.
UPDATE: Since this article was written, Let's Fix Britain has been contacted by seven other people reporting similar treatment of them by Aston Fox. Our first piece of free advice is for you to write to them saying that you will involve us unless they pay up. If that still does not work, then you may want to purchase our letter-writing service and if that doesn't work, we are willing to work for you to recover your money on a no-win, no-fee basis. Please contact us to arrange things.
UPDATE:
Reader "P.M." wrote to us explaining that Aston
Fox had been treating him as badly as the client featured
in this article - retaining rent money without justification,
and ignoring his emails and phone messages. Our advice was to initially write again to Aston Fox,
explaining that - if they did not send his money immediately,
he would engage Let's Fix Britain to act on his behalf.
P wrote to us last week and we re-produce his email with
permission:
Just thought I would keep you in the loop. Wednesday
I let rip at Aston fox and threatened that if it wasn't
sorted before the end of the week I was going to go to
Lets Fix Britain, Trading Standards, Watchdog, Rogue Traders,
The Sun, Homes4U, Findaproperty.com and anybody else I
could think of.
Yesterday they paid the cheque in my account!!!
Thanks for your help.
P.
UPDATE: April 2007: We were engaged by another client to write a complaint letter to Aston Fox, who said: Your attachment letter to Aston Fox is perfect.
Please go ahead and send letter as soon as possible.
UPDATE: April 2007: We sent the letter, and later I conducted a 40 minute phonecall with Philip Chandler, who agreed to forward a cheque to clear the debts. This was received by my client on April 24th, ad he wrote:
Hello Chris, Finally we received the cheque. My wife, Andrea picked up the cheque at about 16:45 from the Aston Fox East Ham office. The amount is for £1,913.20... Thank you for all your help, as I know for certain if it was not for your solid letter writing and knowledge of this particular type of company, this (i.e. Receipt of cheque today) would not be possible.
UPDATE: June 2007: We were contacted by Mr. H.H. who was experiencing poor service from Aston Fox. In this case, Aston Fox were only passing rent to the landlords after constant badgering from our client, rent being late on five out of 6 times, but up to a month. As is always reported to us by our clients, Aston Fox werealso being evasive and unpleasant in response to our client's reasonable requests. We were retained to write a letter to Aston Fox and did so. On this ocassion, it did not produce the requred results and our client decided not to take things further for the time being.
UPDATE: July 2007: Another client, Mr. A.S. contacted us on behalf of his son, who gave Aston Fox nearly £2,000 up-front rental for a house which they never got to move in to. Aston Fox refused to return that money for no good reason. Mr. A.S. asked us to write a letter of complaint which we did. However, we didn't send it. Mr. A.S. said:
Hi Chris
I am pleased to inform you that a cheque was received from Philip Chandler of Aston Fox and that it has now cleared into my son's account.
I will no longer require your letter writing service but I am sure that the mention of your organisation helped in persuading Philip Chandler to write a cheque in a fairly prompt manner.
Many thanks for your advice and I will be keeping an eye on your site for any future developments relating this and other companies.
UPDATE: December 2007: We have received a number of emails from people saying they have problems with Aston Fox keeping their money without good reason. Here is a typical example:
Hello Chris
My name is [supplied] and I am on eof the "victims" os Axton Fox. My partner found out that Mr. Chandler had lost the lisense to be a director and contacted you in my behalf over a month ago, as Axton Fox owe me payment for two months. They paid and Mr.Chandler spoke to me saying all should be ok from now on. But it is not. They payment they should have done around the [... December] I haven't got, and it is the usual excuses, " you can leave a message for Stephjanie ill tell her to call you back" or "she is not in", or "she is in a meeting". I know them all.
I am going to send a letter saying that if I dont receive the money but the end of this month I will get you guys involve, and obviosly carry it out....
PLEASE NOTE:
Aston Fox have been notified of this article.
On If Aston Fox wish to express their views
I will place them here, un-edited.
From conversation with Philip Chandler I would like to point out the following on his behalf:
It's important to recognise that we usually see only the cases that go wrong. It may (or may not) be that these form a tiny minority of the client relationships maintained by Aston Fox.
Aston Fox tell us that they receive many letters and gifts from extremely satisfied customers. I have asked them to place these online, and I will be very happy to provide a link to them here.
It is also important to take care to ensure that you have a valid case before proceeding with a complaint. Ason Fox tell me that many clients simply don't read their contract or terms & conditions before complaining. So please do so, and be sure that Aston Fox is in breach before you take action.
UPDATE: December 2007
We received a letter from Aston Fox's Solicitors, WH Matthews & Co, which we are happy to publish here:
Dear Sir
Re: Aston Fox
As you may be aware, we act for Aston Fox and we note that in email correspondence you have invited my clients to express an opinion with regard to the information contained on your website, and that you would publish the letter unedited and our client is taking up this offer by way of this letter.
Our client has a well established firm in the East Ham area, having operated there for many years and has built up a reputation for being honest, reliable and hard-working which has enabled the company to expand.
Our client was extremely concerned that the Landlord you referred to at the beginning of your website received a service below one you can normally expect from a professional client such as ours and he fully accepts the criticism received. However, your website fails to mention the fact that your client has now been fully reimbursed and would you please therefore take steps to correct this accordingly.
With regards to the complaint made by another tenant in April 2007, the information contained therein is incorrect. The Landlord was always paid on time if not earlier than in accordance with the terms and conditions he signed. The basis of his complaint is therefore wrong.
With regard to Mr H, unfortunately once again the information you have been given is incorrect and we confirm that all monies have been accounted for to your client and we enclose a copy of the email sent to him confirming this fact
Our clients have dealt with many successful matters, and we ourselves have seen a whole file of compliments sent to our clients following conclusions of same.
It is therefore totally wrong to paint a picture that our clients are doing something wrong when he runs a very professional service. One genuine complaint out of numerous satisfied customers is not a basis for the tone of your site.
We trust this letter is published and edited on to the site so that people can get a fair balanced view of the realities of the situation.
Yours faithfully
BARRY LESLER
LFB NOTE REGARDING THIS LETTER:
Our clients fundamentally disagree with Aston Fox, and on every occasion we have represented a client, Aston Fox have finally relented and paid up what they owe.
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