"LUXURY PRICES ≠ LUXURY SERVICES"

LUXURY PRICES ≠ LUXURY SERVICES

Do you know the feeling when you go to an expensive restaurant and you’d expect an awesome service, food, surroundings and the satisfaction? Renting with QL is like that except you’ll not get anything you were promised, charged extra for whatever they feel like, and treated with the worst customer service — all while you are paying top £££, of course.

Few examples to maintain a reasonably short read:
- The Envac trash chute: doesn’t really work
- Mail room: parcels missing, not in the right place, messy. Prepare to spend over 20 minutes each visit to search for your parcel. 📦
- Utilities: prepare to pay the same/more even when you’re not using the power because they make numbers up 🙃
- Bogus fines: they will fine you for anything. So, be cautious when you are walking around the building for which you pay over £2300/month, or you will be fined for breathing…
- Card fees!! Even if you pay 6 months rent in advance via links that their staff sent to you, they will still charge you 3% (non-direct debit) card fee, due to ‘administrative cost’.

Let’s just say it’s like going to a 5 stars restaurant and they give you spoiled salmon on a toilet seat and the bill is £700, but once you paid it, you will get slapped with a non direct debit card fee, because that’s normal.

"No good"

Poor internet

High rent amount compared with others renter apartment

Spam utility bills - you wont be able to see your meter

Many tenants complained that they will deducted a lot from your £1000 deposit at the end with no reasons

"Honest review after 3 years living at Quintain. (Utility Scam? 30% rental increase! And low security!)"

Here’s my honest review after living 3 years in a one bedroom Apartment with one of the buildings from Quintain Living.

There are a few reasons why we decided to leave:

• Price: We began living with Quintain in 2021, paying around £1700 in rent plus £110 for utilities (without any reconciliation issues). With each renewal, we faced an almost 30% increase. We were currently paying £2025 plus utilities, which exceed £250 per month(with their “reconciliation” bills. If we were to renew again, the price would increase even further.

• Utilities: We have concerns about the utility system here. It’s not just me; I’ve spoken to more than 50 other residents who share these concerns, suspecting it might be a scam.(!!!) This includes people living in Alto, Dakota, etc. in every building! We have compiled a list of names to support our claims. For instance, last year, there were periods when we were away for an entire month, with no heating or appliances in use, yet Quintain Living still charged us for “reconciliation” on bills. How can charges exceed £200 for a month when the apartment was unoccupied and everything was turned off? Customer service from Quintain Living was absolutely trash, as our concerns were ignored for an entire year.

These are the main points of concern. However, there are other factors that have led us to realize that the living conditions have changed from what we initially enjoyed, such as security concerns (including two incidents where strangers from outside entered our neighbor’s apartment and instances of bike theft from the bike storage area).

Additionally, the perks we once enjoyed, such as tickets to shows or games, are no longer available has been years.

We hope this feedback helps clarify our concerns and aids in making the living conditions more justifiable for future tenants.

"Expect to be swindled"

Unfortunately what advertises itself as “no hidden costs” has a very lucrative pairing with a certain energy provider. Expect to be swindled hundreds per month for your utilities, even if you spend time away from your property. You will be charged metering charges higher than the expenditure on the actual electricity/hot water. Although the facilities are good, this makes the living here only possible if you have money to burn!

"Utilities are an absolute scam."

Utilities are an absolute scam.

"SCAM: Utilities Overcharge, Parcels Stolen, Extremely Unsafe, Rude Staff, Skyrocketing price"

There’s really no way to best describe Quintain aside from scam. The issue list (non-exhaustive) is as follows:

- 3 parcels stolen with absolutely nothing done by the residents team. Took over 3 months to answer my email and then took another 3 months (several chases with no response) to ask the company with the CCTV to provide the footage to the police. Police were chasing as well with no response. They saw the cameras of someone taking it and said so over email and just said to take it up with the police “as they couldn’t disclose the person’s identity”. 24 hour security is absolutely a lie.

- Utilities overcharge: Our bills have been ridiculously high and Quintain charges these every quarter (140 is deducted from your direct debit automatically + ridiculous amounts from their quarterly reconciliation).

Our bills for a 2 bed are always 220-270 a month without ever using heater or a lot of light / electricity. There were several months where we were out of town for over 2 weeks as we travel a lot and the prices and amount of kw per day remained the same.

Both Kw price and standing charges are almost double the price of the current market rate and on an email last year when the prices went up they said it would only increase 25% but it is much like over 60% each month. (These estimates made by them last year were on an actual 2 bed).

- Skyrocketing prices: The prices on the rent went up by over 350 pounds last year which is insane;

- Poor Security: Security is constantly letting tailgaters get in and does not ask for identity or flat number / name whatsoever. I’ve had cases where I really felt for my safety being in the elevator with drunken people staring at me and trying to speak to me. Also, there were aggressive people in the gym loudly screaming and clearly high on drugs and it took months of them saying this was never a reported issue and actually having to drag them to the gym while it was happening to get it sorted. Also, crazy aggressive dogs who tried to attack my dog and other dogs repeatedly inside the building with no issues raised to the owners who just keep bringing him unmuzzled, even after complaining about this.

- Rude Staff: Day staff never open the door for you nor care about your problems. They will extremely gaslight you and make you feel like a lunatic when you raise a complaint about anything that’s really serious. To me this is the most enrarging. I remember frantically looking for my 3rd parcel stolen with a member of the residents team and she didn’t even care to help me look for it, let alone try and solve the issue. We also did not have a key for our mailbox months on end and our intercom has NEVER worked. Once our window wouldn’t shut with the worst cold and they literally said nothing could be done because there’s no maintenance staff overnight.

Honestly, if you come here you will be paying to get completely scammed.

"If you are thinking about moving to Quintain Living, think twice"

Utilities - Since I moved in, my utility bills have been unreasonably high. I’ve already raised the issue a number of times with the residents team and they never do anything about it, often claiming that this has to do with quarterly reconciliations even though the daily usage breakdowns clearly show otherwise. I was away for 2 months at the end of the year and yet the energy consumption charge was still as if I was using my flat for this whole time. Be wary of their claims to have apartments with an "energy B consumption efficiency”, when in practice, you’ll be overcharged for consumption. When raising this topic with other residents, dozens of them could relate and had similar complaints on how their utility bills were incompatible with their usage.
In summary, the issue with the utilities are the following:
1) Quintain charges us arbitrary usage values for our utilities - If you’re away from your flat for a month or a few weeks, you’ll notice that your usage will still remain extremely high. We asked for the daily breakdown of our usage while we were away and observed that we were getting charged 5.5kWh/day for days when we had everything turned off. That’s more than an average 1bed with 2 people in the UK consumes on average per day.
2) Electricity prices are extremely above the market rate - Local energy providers charge something between 24-29p/kWh while Quintain charges 42.5p/kWh, which is almost 50% more than normal.
3) When asking Quintain to be more transparent about their communication with the energy provider and give us more details about the company, the management claims to not know the name of the company they are directly communicating with.
4) Quintain management constantly gaslights their residents, claiming that issues with their utility billing are one-off cases and that they’ve never heard of something similar before. In reality, there are dozens of complaints on platforms like Trustpilot and Google Maps, several mentioning their utility bill scam.

Commute - For individuals working in Central London, the commute is still unreasonably long for what you’ll pay. Quintain charges ~2.3k for one-bedroom flats in Zone 4, while one can easily find similarly priced options in Zone 2.

Social spaces - The social spaces provided by Quintain Living come with a hefty price tag. Residents are only allowed to have up to two guests for free in the building’s social spaces. For 3 guests or more, you are forced to book the social space privately and they charge you £20/h for some sofas and a TV and £40/h for a table and a kitchen. If you decide not to book, you can bet that someone will notice and will charge you anyways.

In retrospect, I regret my decision to move into a Quintain flat. Being new to London, I relied mostly on the guidance from my real estate agent. I was unfamiliar with the city and lacked knowledge of alternative housing options, leading me to select the option that was recommended by my agent. This seems to be a pattern among several of the residents here: many of us were newcomers to London who were unaware of the diverse housing options available. Now we all have to remain in our leases until they expire. Our unfamiliarity with the city and utility bill consumption made us vulnerable to utility bill scams. The realization of the discrepancy only came when we compared our bills with those of non-Quintain Living residents and noticed how absurd the price and utilities consumption we are being charged for.

Therefore, before moving to a Quintain Living flat, think twice!

Ps.: Some concierges are very kind and helpful. I'd like to give a special thanks to Carla.

"Scamming utilities cost"

I was charged extra for heat costs randomly when it has never been turned on. On June while traveling abroad for 4 weeks my utilities and electricity usage/cost were higher than usual meaning they are lying about utilities usage.

They NEVER clean windows. We were promised they would clean our windows 2x per year, it was longer than 1 year ago since they last did it.

"Complete Scam with a business model of “if we ignore the problem (the tenants) it will go away”"

Quintain Living like to advertise a friendly living space where you can live and relax in peace, with no worries over fees etc., however, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Over the past few months I have had constant problems with the management team and how they deal with utilities. This stemmed from being charged an extra £400 in one of their “quarterly reconciliations” for “usage” over the £140 we were already paying per month.

This company likes to promote that they’ll take care of your utilities where you pay a set fee monthly. They like to give you false promises that you can get a refund if you use less than what you have paid. This is impossible as several people I have spoken to note they have been away from their flat for months at a time with everything turned off and were still charged a ridiculous amount in electricity.

I began to look into this, comparing it to previous bills I had in other flats and I was shocked. It took weeks of me going to the concierge every day to receive any helpful information around their utilities billing, as they had never bothered to set up an account for my flat on the utilities portal. Even after asking for months if this could be set up so we have some clarity, I am left with silence. We are unable to access the physical meters as well as the online metering portal as they refuse to set us up an account and when we tried and it hadn’t worked, we we’re not responded to. Which doesn’t make sense when we are paying £70 per month in metering and I am not allowed to see it?!

After finally receiving the bills they had been hiding from us for 5 months, we were appalled. They had measured our electricity usage for the months of August and September combined as 570 kWh, but then the October bill was measured as double those at 540 kWh for a single month with no change in usage. It is pertinent to note that this is for 2 people in a 2 bed flat and is not inclusive of heating as this is metered and charged at a different rate. The next month was 420, and the next 380 kWh. It seems as though the numbers are pulled from thin air. I have spoken to 40+ tenants and even after requesting physical meter readings, I haven’t found one person who has received them.

My flatmate and I have a proven track record in a supposedly less energy efficient, older building that was all electric. The bills we received in our old building for electricity included the electric underfloor heating used in winter and were still less than the electricity usage in this flat that doesn’t use electric heating by almost 1/3.

Before we had received the bills to know where our charges were coming from (mostly the insane electricity amount), we had turned off the heating from the switch to stop it from accidentally being on as we could not afford to pay any more. This meant that we had no heating for all of winter and were still given a £400 top up bill.

We have asked for these numbers to be checked as there is no way we are using what they have been telling us. The response we receive is just “our team have checked it is correct”.

This is all without even mentioning the ridiculous rates at which they were charging us. Our rate for electricity was 45.5p per kWh when the Ofgem cap was 27.35p! Their practices seem absolutely criminal and because they know we don’t have funds to fight this legally, they ignore us until we are no longer a problem. Choosing to sucker somebody else to live here next!

The complete lack of visibility we are afforded is disgusting and I cannot recommend more that you look elsewhere to live unless you want random bills thrown at you every 3 months.

Disgusting practice.

"Utility scam, hidden charges and stripping all services "

Utility scam! They act as a supplier without being a utility company, that means they can charge you whatever they want! Translated to real life..."metering charges" come to 70-80% of our useage bill (£70-90 a month)! They charge extra for every single item (electricity, hot water, heating, water, waste water...) even tho they only calculate them withtout any actual metering involved... not mentioning that all meters are smart digital and it takes them basically one click to get the data! Renting from QL for almost 5 years their services got stripped step by step to bare minimum! No concierge service, no safe package store, no night service management on site, communal spaces are now for booking and extra charge only, limited resident events, removed utilities included in rent, slow or no responce from raised issues, constant internet problems/"updates", unsolved security issues, no external window cleaning done for overa year!, rude staff.... year by year the service level gets less woth the already high price! If you can - STAY AWAY!