Cheeky rental agency - Rettie 101A/17 St Stephen Street Edinburgh

We've been living in our flat since last January. The property is:

101A/17 St. Stepehen Street Edinburgh

Less than one week after moving in, we noticed that water was entering through one of the window casings. It didn't seem too bad at the time, but obviously was not a good sign. We immediately emailed the rental agency:

Rettie & Co 1 India Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HA 0131 220 4160

Here is the email response:

"Many thanks for your email, and it was good to discuss all of the items on the telephone earlier today. I have instructed two contractors to attend - Raymond for the handyman issues, and Valentine Property Services to look at the windows and water ingress.

They will both be in touch shortly to arrange an appointment to attend, and pelase do let me know if you have any further queries in the meantime, or if you discover anything else."

The water problem has gotten consistently worse since then, and has turned into a smelly mold on the window casing. We have, every month or so, reminded Rettie that the problem has not been resolved, and at every stage have been reassured that it would be taken care of right away, or that because the problem was complicated, it required special logistics, or contacting another party (such as the building owners). Regardless, not one minute of work has been done to fix the problem.

Last month we notified Rettie that we wanted to rent the flat again, and they had the nerve to tell us that "the owner wanted to increase the rent."

We pondered this for a while. Today we sent them an email pointing out that the water problem has been "current" for 280 days, and we thought it was a bit cheeky to ask to increase the rent when they aren't holding up their part of the rental agreement.

To be honest, I mostly expect them to serve notice.

I will blog about this daily until it is resolved one way or the other.

But the bottom line is that there is a water entry problem in this flat that is at least 280 days old.