Needs a shake-up of their processes. Letting agent James Murphy proved to be very poor. The previous tenants trashed the place and we were told by James without a shred of empathy a day prior to moving in that we couldn’t move into our new flat. This continued for several weeks as the move-in date continuously kept being pushed back because Martin&Co couldn’t get their act together with their contractors. At first we were given false timescales and then none at all with us taking time off work and the £1000+ deposit, fees and the first month’s rent paid in advance hanging in the balance. Attempts to raise concerns to management were met with evasion and outright rudeness from him. James and his colleague Liam refused to provide contact details for their manager. When we moved into the flat itself he was nowhere to be found and had left the duty of handing over the keys to a junior member of staff named Ed who couldn’t answer any of our questions and suggested we sign an inventory saying everything was perfect “for our own convenience”. Understandably we refused this. And good job because when we actually moved into the flat there were numerous outstanding repair issues and the photos we took of filthy parts of the flat didn’t match up with Martin&Cos, suggesting perhaps they had hired the cleaner BEFORE having the contractors round, a definite rookie mistake. Admin processes seem to be dogged by a lack of communication and effective note-taking. We felt certain key issues were not logged. Because our move-in date was delayed by several weeks we arranged through Martin & Co to pay on a different date each month; it took several separate accusations that we’d missed our rent for this to finally be acknowledged on the system. For maintenance issues contractors would be round in a few days sometimes, and a few months other times. It took 2-3 months to get a new blind installed owing to a series of miscommunications between the letting agent staff and the contractor. The landlord's spare keys were lost, necessitating one of us having to go in so they could cut another set. They also tried to arrange viewings without the required 24 hours notice; when you work full time this is as insensitive as it is daft. Additionally when we were moving out they tried to charge us £400.00+ in rent for a period we didn’t even lease the flat for! Thankfully we received an apology and an amendment of the mistake from Donna who was pleasant enough to deal with, but I feel the processes of the agency need to be looked at in further depth as this was part of the rule rather than an exception to the whole experience we had had with them. They charge agency fees which are ridiculous and it is good that they will soon be outlawed. An exit fee of £48.00 and instead of a deposit you are charged a fee to take the property off the market. We were charged a £75.00 “light cleaning” fee on leaving the property, despite us leaving it in a 10x better state than when we moved in. By this time however we had had so many issues from them that we considered this the necessary price for never having to deal with them again. I have to say the manager Julie is a shrewd businesswoman and any competence that came from within the company was largely from her. It took her direct intervention to get the move-in and maintenance issues sorted, including arranging for our tenancy to start from the day we moved in instead of basically having 2-3 weeks stolen from us. Thank god we had managed to get her contact details (with no help from office staff) because I don’t know where we’d be without her intervention. If I was her I’d take a serious look at the processes of the business and some of the staff she employs. It’s not right for a manager to be cleaning up sales’ mistakes and from other reviews on this page our experience doesn’t seem to have been a unique one. One wonders just how much communication there was between staff and whether the issues are down to genuine incompetance or something more sinister.