Having been a renter for over 6 years both in Queensland and the US, I have never come across a…read moremore incompetent group of leasing and real estate agents than those of Sovereign Realty.
Where to begin. From day dot Sovereign Realty have been useless and lazy as leasing agents. Moving back from the US later last year we were very excited about our move to the Gold Coast and literally had our whole life plus 2 dogs in one car ready to move in to our new home at Biggera Waters in December. Upon arrival to the Sovereign Reality office, we were told our keys were not ready (even though the lease was signed weeks prior) and copped attitude from a bratty receptionist called Jamie.
We moved into a brand new duplex with no prior tenants. Yet the home had many issues from the get go. It was very dirty including foot marks, scuffs on walls and tiles, not to mention a disgusting mess in an upstairs toilet. It was also the middle of summer, and the master bedroom air con was broken. Yulia Far, the leasing agent put the issues down to "teething issues every new house has". This was a massive cop out and should have been a red flag from the start. Yulia is lazy and also has very poor communication skills, but that's a whole different issue to talk about.
I made a point back to her that "if this was a new car or new appliance which no one else had used, I would not expect any teething issues" Long story short, Yulia didn't want to deal with the issues, nor did the bratty receptionist Jamie, so we were left with weeks of dealing with a broken air con, and in the meantime had our kitchen tap basically snap off at the sink which took another few weeks to fix. First world problems, I know. But this is the whole reason why leasing agents exist, to assist in the upkeep of the rental when you have issues.
Moving on, we needed to break lease for personal/family reasons and had zero assistance from the SR team. We were made to feel more or less like criminals that we needed to "break lease". We were charged the re-let fee which is standard practice when breaking lease however the overly incompetent team at Sovereign Realty pushed the add live online including completely wrong images of the property, indicating it was a single storey home and not double storey. This caused a lot of ambiguity for prospective tenants, we even had one group come through the house who had a child in a wheelchair, only looking at the house because they were under the impression it was single storey. I felt so awful they wasted their time and yet Sovereign Realty team showed no remorse here! Updating the images to the correct ones took over a week to fix (and working previously in property marketing myself, I know how quick and easy this is to update via a CMS like portplus or hubonline. It's literally a 5 min job and takes an hour or so on the front end to update)
SR were so incompetent at marketing the property (I had a theory they were just ignoring enquiries as they literally have 12 rentals at once and obviously rentals are not their priority) I ended up creating a GumTree ad with the correct images and had over 20 hits alone from this over 2 weeks.
Yet when we constantly asked for updates on how the official real estate.com and domain.com ads were going it would get the reply that "it's a slow time of year for the rental market and no one is enquiring" aka "we are the laziest bunch of leasing agents on the planet" Again, such a cop out!
I could go on and on about how frustrating it was working with this group but it angers me so much and I wish to put it behind me. Do yourself a favour and steer clear from this lot, for buying, selling, leasing... basically ANYTHING real estate related. They are lazy, useless and have such a poor attitude. Yulia is lazy and the receptionist Jamie obviously has no passion/hates her job and both need a reality check professionally and personally.
