SpareRoom.co.uk

I applied for quite a few rents for rooms. Never had a single reply then there was one really good one which I had to pay £11.99 to message. Then I auto message came back saying they wasn't not interested anymore in renting. So just a total con. Please save your money

Dear Sir/Madam

I wish to make a formal complaint about SpareRoom and their landlord advertisers who placed ads on their website for single/double rooms. I also noticed how they all 'preferred female' to be of a certain age to meet their criteria which I find disgustingly sexist, ageism and clearly unfair to their male counterparts.

I joined SpareRoom in the hope of finding a room. But instead, I experienced a nightmare of rejections from all sides that nearly result in me being thrown out on the streets. I wasted five months of my hard earned money upgrading my membership trying to find somewhere to live and was never successful getting an appointment with anyone.

No one even had the courtesy to respond to any of my emails, never mind returning my calls. I was in a desperate situation, and all I get in return was a few landlords with an attitude problem asking me foolish questions like my age and telling me the rooms are only available for women.

I can fully understand if an advert is placed on SpareRoom for an all-ladies household, then by all means, a lady is required. But what really annoys me most, is when a room is advertised in a mixed household, the landlords still 'preferred female' and they have to be of a certain age too which is fact is illegal anyway.

The most ironic thing about this whole sorry episode, is that I have seen the same sexist adverts posted on four or five different websites from the same advertisers, spouting the same rubbish just to attract 'preferred females' to their lair.

SpareRoom need to get their house in order and start reviewing their policies and informed their advertisers (or landlords) to read the government's Equality Act 2010 and age discrimination laws | Age UK. It fully states that landlords cannot discriminate a person whether of age, gender, race, sexual orientation etc.

For a person searching for an accommodation, it should be fair for everyone across the board and not for landlords to choose the weaker sex just to satisfy their lust and their curiosity. All those who request such things in an advertisement are literally breaking the law and as a result, your company could face a messy lawsuit.

After the bad experience I had with SpareRoom, I will not use them ever again. Because they simply don't care about anyone but themselves. Moreover, their advertisers (or landlords) are just as bad, they are rude, callous and discriminate towards men and people's age.

(Name withheld in disgust)

Tenants should be able to give reviews to landlords and rate them. Otherwise SpareRoom.co.uk is an extremely unfair and obsolete concept.

This website asks you to pay for an upgrade for contacting landlords and if you pay, no one replies to your ad/message. Absolutely fake!

Spareroom used to be a great place for landlords to find tenants and for tenants to find somewhere to live but over the past year the website is littered by fake adverts from letting agents. As a landlord I used to get lots of replies to my advert (which cost £24.99 for 28 days) but now there are so many agents adverts on there that your advert very quickly (within a couple of hours) slides down the list and off the first several pages so that it is very unlikely that your advert will be seen after those first couple of hours. Renewing your advert only places your advert to the top of the bold list for the DAY that you placed your advert - so if you placed your advert 7 days ago then you will always have 7 days worth of adverts above yours as well as other adverts on your advert's day which have been renewed since yours was. Tenants have told me most of the letting agents adverts are fake (e.g. Great location, lovely property, low rent) and are just used to get you to call the agent who will say that property you phoned about is no longer available but will persuade you to go and view their other "amazing" properties which tend to be in not such a great location, are not so nice and nowhere near as good value as their advertised property. Spareroom are of course a business and make good money out of the agents adverts but this has resulted in the website becoming pretty useless for landlords and tenants.

I recommend not to use this platform if you ever have to rent a room. It is not safe as they announce.
They do not check who is advertising and they do not protect you in case the advertiser does not follow the law.

Do not trust this site. They allow to their site to have advertisments that are propably a scum (they even "warned" me about it with email but didnt do anything else. Advertisment was still on their site). I almost been hakked a couple of days later.

I have been using spareroom since 2011 to rent out my spare room and occasionally to find a room. I was always very pleased with the service provided and efficiency of this website.
Initially, it was so efficient that you could put a free ad and still manage to get people to contact you. Later on, putting a paid/featured ad became a common practice if I wanted to rent out the room quickly because more and more people started placing ads on the website. I was still very satisfied as it was efficient and a real value for money.

I have not used the website for few months and last week I posted a paid ad on spareroom and was very very very disappointed!
I placed the ad at 2pm and at 8pm the same day I could not find my ad anywhere. I called customer support team and was advised that my ad dropped to 100+ place due to high volume of ads for this area and I need to keep pressing renew button to push it up. However, this "renew" option does not work as my ad still stays on the same place or even drops further. I then was advised to search for people who are looking to rent in the same area and contact them, which I find not an efficient way at all, and it increases spamming, it is not and should not become a dating website or a friend making/meeting website.

Tanya