Seriously narked off with the rental agents who look after our house (that we don’t live in at the moment and rent out and live in rented elsewere for job reasons). For the 5th month in a row they have naused up our monthly satement and paid us incorrectly. Hundreds of pounds short again. They have also failed to arrange the maintence we arranged for them to do seriously inconveniencing our tenants.

We are tied into a contract with them which would cost us heaps to terminate early (with the tenant remaining in place & I don’t want have to try and evict them because of the stupid agent for as much theirs and our sake). I want to threaten the agent we’ll walk away from the contract without paying any termination fee on the grounds of their incompetence. Is there a legalise phrase for that…something that sounds better than ‘because you’re crap’!

Ta

breach of contract

But you’ll have to actually read what you signed and identify which bits of the contract they are in breach of.

Surely breach of contract?

That was the phrase I was trying to remember.

wiki

If the party does not fulfill his contractual promise, or has given information to the other party that he will not perform his duty as mentioned in the contract or if by his action and conduct he seems to be unable to perform the contract, he is said to breach the contract.

Sounds ok – provided the contract says they are obliged to pay us timely and accurately the correct monies owed. Will go a digging.

Has to be breach of contract as I will be fairly sure they agreed to pay you the correct amount.

It may or may not have reasons to which you can break but not paying you correctly will be one anyway* – the contract, for obvious reasons, cannot trump actual law. Also bad publicity for them if they do fight.

Might want to cite as many material breaches as you can as well.
Personally i would write to them explain your reasons say you want to terminate without any penalty and of they object you will go to court and generate lots and lots of publicity and hope they just let you without complaining.

* IMHO and IANAL but being paid correctly and on time is an implicit contract term anyway even if it is not explicitly stated in the contract. I will be surprised if it is not stated.

I did just the same to a bunch of incompetent letting agents who were charging me money to add cost and delay to any issue with the house. I just wrote them a letter explaining their failures and saying that I’d no longer be paying their fees. They tried getting arsey but ultimately realised their conduct was abysmal and they gave in.

Breach of contract only covers where they have actually failed to deliver against a clause or obligation of a contract, so doesn’t cover incompetence – how do you define that? Unless there is a specific clause in the contract covering the service they provide e.g. A specific Service Level Agreement, then if they continue to deliver against the contract, even after repeated attempts, then you’ve got nowhere to go I’m afraid. Everyone is allowed reasonable efforts to deliver against their obligations in a contract, and if you want to challenge the definition of reasonable then you’ll have to take them to court, but as long as they’ve always delivered up until now then the odds are against you. And even then you have a duty to mitigate your situation – you can’t just sit back and do nothing then cry breach. Also the remedy for breach is usually compensation for damages you have sustained as a result of their breach, rather that termination of the contract. It’s usually very tough if not impossible to get out of a contract unless both/all parties want out.

If you want to email me the contract, I could have a quick look and see if you’ve got a express right to terminate (unlikely, but by far the easiest route!).

Going for repudiatory breach isn’t as straight forward as you might hope…

Have you got some evidence, or email/letter correspondence that shows you picking them up on each time they’ve breached their obligations?

Cheers PF – I’ll dig it out when I’m home if that’s ok.

Sadly, as my wife reminds me, 4 out of 5 times it was a phone call to inform them on the money and we only have email correspondence on one of the payment issues and the maintenance issue. Not looking very bright really. Will follow up all calls with emails from now on. Been using them 6 years and whilst expensive and a bit stand offish they got everything correct. It’s like they had a personality transplant 6 months ago. I guess they could have if there has been much staffing changes.

No worries convert…I’m about to head 60th birthday party (1920’s prohibition theme!) and then on a 0725 flight in the morning and won’t be flying back until late tomorrow night…so will be Monday before I get the chance to look at it…

Many thanks & enjoy the party!

I’m about to head 60th birthday party

you don’t look a day of 59