TLDR Terrible service, rude landlord and reluctant management of beautiful (but not well maintained) apartments in Porto, Portugal
TLDR; beautiful apartments in Porto, Portugal (but not maintained well), terrible service, rude and arrogant landlord and reluctant management.
The booking process is nice and easy, they help you with your questions. Only they don't send the check-in info until the day of.
The house I stayed in (Heroismo co-living) is a gorgeous old house, but the renovation was not finished well. The garden was meant to be finished during the spring, but nothing happened during 4 months. What they don't mention, is that there is an office in the first floor next to kitchen, where there are multiple people working (for the company), coming and going with their keys every day. The views are beautiful and the furnishing is mostly nice, but worn out for the amount of use with more than ten tenants.
If you have any feedback during your stay, you are first getting some "we will look into this", and then nothing happens. What you get for fees (higher than other booking platforms) you pay for booking, the SRF support, is rewording your emails to the landlord (CEO of the company), and no real answers or support. All the beautiful words and no action.
The management team is separate, and reluctant, sometimes doing things (toilet was fixed), sometimes not (visibly moldy, fuzzy wall for 2 months). You will rarely see them in the house, they will not bring the keys to you. They forget to fix things, and when you ask again, they will respond in rude manner or pretend they already fixed it. The service is just not great.
The landlords (leaders of SRF as well) are the worst. If you have to communicate with them about for example compensation for issues like leaking roofs (lasted 4 months, still unfixed), liters and liters of sewage water leaking on living room floors, or being locked out of your apartment/the whole building overnight because of a faulty lock system, they will just deny everything, blame the tenants, threaten that the tenants will have to pay for repairs and threaten with lawyers. If you want to have a direct conversation with the landlords instead of the "support" rewriting both parts emails, they will be hostile, hint at you being poor/your parents paying for your life, shout at you and communicate in belittling manner in general. ("Did you study the law? I studied the law!")
In addition to the service being worst I have encountered in my life, the whole arrangement is unclear to say the least. The company claims to be a platform for landlords and tenants to connect, but at least in Porto many of the apartments are owned by the owners of the company. So if you think you are getting some additional support, when coming from abroad, you are mistaken. It's the same people, the landlord is not the support's client, but their boss. I still don't know if the management team is a part of the same company as well, at least they try to make it seem as if they are completely separate. I will just put here what they themselves claim:
"Weâd like to clarify that Student Room Flat is a booking platform and acts as an intermediary between tenants and landlords when needed. While we carefully select our housing partners and do our best to ensure quality standards are met, the day-to-day management of the apartment, such as maintenance, repairs, and communication, is handled directly by the landlords and/or their local property managers.
That said, if there are any issues during a stay that can't be resolved with the property manager and/or landlord, we always encourage tenants to reach out to our support team during the rental period, so we can step in and assist wherever possible."
It just doesn't make sense.
They will take months to process your deposit (way more than the 2 months that is promised), and take money from it for things that don't apply to you, even though they claim to handle every one separately.
This might sound terrible, but the experience is shared among my flatmates (12 of us), and the way of communicating has been similar for tenants in other properties that I have talked to. We obviously have tried to handle this privately with the company, and spent hours and hours writing emails and trying to have an open discussion, but without a result. It is possible they have served some customers well, I just haven't heard about it.
2025幎5æ31æ¥
èªçºçãªã¬ãã¥ãŒ