Joe Lycett TESTS SpareRoom by Advertising Kids Playhouse?? | Joe Lycett's Got Your Back

let's talk about spare room the uk's leading online flat and house share platform if you need to find somewhere to live or someone to live with you can do it all through spare rooms easy-to-use website find home together almost but not quite a sentence the founder and CEO of spare room is called rupert hunt here's a picture of him i think he looks a bit like Mark Ruffalo yeah actually he looks like what would happen if Mark Ruffalo had a child with a coin spare rooms say they vet all of the listings for rooms on their site and you can be sure your safety is our priority they seem to have happy customers coming out of their ears which is physically impressive but not everyone is a happy customer a lot of the listings on spare room haven't actually been placed there by ordinary people looking for new roomies but have been posted by lettings agencies agents like these guys sterling de Vere this is them once I say their logo looks like a very specific body part you'll never see anything else these guys stood out because of the huge number of reviews they have and at first glance a lot of very positive but dig a bit deeper and some of them look a bit suspicious to me this review was left by someone called Patricia Noll she looks very respectable sort of woman you'd leave your dog with hoping it would eat her but hang on it turns out that photo is just a stock image plus we found this exact same review word-for-word was posted several months earlier by someone called Marilyn except that she was writing about an air conditioning company in California but among the glowing reviews we found a lot of one-star reviews how many did we find mark Wow almost 300 my lucky number lovely stuff so as Holly Willoughby said when she found me in her bathroom there's something wrong here and I want to find out how it has happened hi it's me Joel I sit but now in a ridiculous shirt we've been looking into snazzy London estate agent sterling de Vere here's their glossy brochure Daniel Craig on the front they're very happy customer I think you should has a bedsit in Croydon but not everyone's as happy as old Danny we've contacted a bunch of former sterling de Vere tenants and today I'm joined by one of them Casey Higgins King hello Casey okay tell me about your experience with sterling de Vere so I basically found a room on spare room which fits very reasonably priced went to sterling de Vera's office and was told that the room was gone they showed me a list of other rooms available for a lot more this sounds a bit like bait-and-switch tactics the act of advertising goods which are an apparent bargain with the intention of substituting inferior or more expensive goods it's something stowing de Vere have been accused of online we can't be sure this happened to Casey but it raised suspicions when I was interested in but they said that somebody was viewing it right now and that if I wasn't to pay the money upfront then I would likely lose out on that room Casey felt pressured that she'd lose the place if you didn't sign there and then so she handed over one thousand eight hundred and forty pounds up front now that sounds to me like pressure selling making someone feel like they need to pay for something upfront or it'll be gone sterling de Vere get accused of that too not that we're saying that's what happened to Casey either how could it those tactics have been under the consumer protection from unfair trading regulations Act of 2008 you paid your money then went to the flat what was he like disgusting really Casey offered to show me some absolute filth on her phone something I'd never say there to [Music] remember Casey was paying 600 pounds a month for one room in this flat share this is the fridge oh that's another ghanoush the locks broke on our flat we got locked in you were locked in locked in that's a prison that's what's cool Casey also found a faulty smoke detector and after just six weeks she left last year sterling devera prosecuted three times once for renting an overcrowded property with inadequate fire precautions but still featured on spare room comm once for failing to publish full details of tenant and landlord fees on their web site but still featured on spare room comm once for engaging in a misleading commercial practice but still featured on spare room calm what do we make of that mr. first symptom that's right we're furious I felt it was about time to have some fun with sterling de Vere and spare room that's sterling de Vere they're blissfully unaware that I've listed their own headquarters as a one bed flat you can actually rent on spare room Amba have an ideal first tenant it's none other than Marcel cards sorry mark all of your new housemates are letting agents good luck oh thank you yes I'm moving in here very nice place very lively place here yeah all right mark I think you should start making yourself at home plugging in a lava lamp fantastic it sends the cool waves you know if you don't allow early maybe it's time to unwrap the picture you're doing really well I'm just trying where I can put justjust one second they actually are kicking off a bit it's not the job I paid the money yeah my girlfriend gave that to slapping back at school yes of wood that's not illegal is it yes mark mark Silcox LGBT icon who knew in this office for this mark is determined to get settled in and I put my foot in their face but outside my van gets spotted the camera they've got the camera they're coming over so they're blocking us in so we can't move it temps we might be killed but I'm really excited beautiful just swarming over lower limb and things are about to warm up even more sending the moving van riebeck that loose movements yes lad can you leave them on the side please just to just on the side I think so aggressive so those boxes they've got ridiculous names on them but when assembled they spell out a clever and very satirical message aimed at Sterling de Vere there we go sterling de Vere equals pill emoji and again get a selfie hi oh yes sorry I'm I'm a bit frightened of it what do you want from me okay bye then nice to meet you I'm not sure stealing tavira a nice company we took all our findings and put them to sterling de Vere and they said we've served over 10,000 satisfied clients and when problems occur we have an active customer service department and complaints process our policies that clients miss physically view a room before signing a contract we deny using bait-and-switch and pressure selling tactics we are reviewing our procedures to make them more robust and ensure problems don't happen again what I want to know is if spare-room is serious about looking after their customers why are they accepting listings from a company like Sterling Tevere we'll be seeing if they can answer that question later on and introducing you and them to perhaps the most unusual property ever advertised on spare-room earlier on we met the lovely chaps from lettings agencies sterling de Vere who are still apparently allowed to advertise dozens of rooms on spare room despite being fine for various offences spare room say lettings agencies can use their site to post adverts but they must be registered to a government approved property redress scheme which is a legal requirement that protects tenants sterling de Vere are registered with one of these but we checked a hundred of the other lettings agents on spare room in London and 48% of them are not registered which is that's smart to give me such a high sure it did well spare rooms say they have a team of real people checking every add-on spare room but they also say it wouldn't be practical or possible for us to check every advert on the site what I want to know is how rigorous can all these checks be if they still let unregistered agents operate to test this I made up my own fictional lettings agency and it's called Live and Let Die and I put up these very desirable properties berrak upon tweed train station they let us put up a dog bed which we described as a standalone studio flat spare room were fine with that these listings were still live forty days after we put them up and not once was I asked to verify that I was a registered letting agent so as I shouted to Holly Willoughby while the police were taking me away I thought we were ready to take things to the next level welcome to your new home it's vibrant it's open plan it's a crappy child's play house on spare room come on let me show you around you find me here in the living room it's beautiful rustic feel to the whole place the carpet is woven from a mix of vintage towels by the word vintage I mean used we approach Rupert hunt the CEO of spare room calm for an interview he declined presumably because he was too busy not checking if the lettings agencies on his site a legit he the way I feel the people of Britain deserve better so for if it won't come to me I'll go to him I'm hoping to catch Rupert and talk to him about the large number of unregistered agents on his site alright fellas chatting with the labs finally after two days Rupert showed up morning Rupert just wanted to show you the latest property on spare room I'm Joe hello how are you and we listed this it's still on spare room currently yeah and but you say the actual people check things we just we think you've got a trusted platform and we're worried that some of the Lessing's agents on your platform are members of a property redress scheme unfortunately they they do tea cream back on and disguise themselves this does we found dozens will you help around the property sorry quickly come and have a quick look right so we think you look a bit like Mark Ruffalo so we put Mark Ruffalo in there it's a compliment okay and this is the kitchen here it's also the toilet that pleasure to meet you have a lovely day Lisa what did you make of my consumer show doorstep well actually how would you feel if you were hijacked walking to work you caught him on the hoof yeah and actually he reacted really well he said that he would look into it for us and here's what spare-room have to say after seeing all of our research the phony advert for a dog bed to rent agents out sterling de Vere listing properties despite being fined and other lettings agents operating without being legally registered spare room centres these words thank you mark we've removed all sterling de Vere's ads from spare room we've spoken to them regularly in the past and we had very few complaints about them since however the concerns he raised made it clear that there was still issues we were unaware of after investigating thoroughly we decided to remove all their ads not yet mark there's more we're also introducing a new code of conduct for agents advertising on spare room which not only covers the ads they place with us but also their conduct off-site and when using other channels we will use it as the basis for policing all agent activity on the site how about that a whole new code of conduct [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: Channel 4

Views: 733,626

Rating: 4.90378 out of 5

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Id: IZ-bf4uPDmE

Length: 14min 7sec (847 seconds)

Published: Thu May 16 2019