Houst, London UK - vacation management service in 2025

[Davinder9]

Who has had their loyalty rewarded after several years by having £20,000 misappropriated by Houst?

After many years as a loyal customer to Houst they put my back to the wall and a gun to my head.

I lost over £20,000 in December to Houst and here in January 2025 am being forced to serve a Statutory Demand to have the Houst Company wound-up.

I wonder how many landlords are in the same position as me?

Once my Houst Company winding-up demand is successful Houst should rebrand to Heist.

Houst claim to offer hands-free and stress free property management services but this is far from being the case.

I was forced to leave the Company, which is steadily declining, because the service provided by Houst is far from stress-free and in December two of my Listings were deleted by Airbnb because of issues related to their poor service provision.

In October and November 2024 after speaking about the issues with my Houst managers and looking at every parameter possible to improve the service to a level which is consistently acceptable, my concerns were escalated to their Senior Leadership Team Gary Dobbins and Henry Gilmour.

The feedback I received from this Senior Leadership Team was that their service couldn’t be improved to a consistently reasonable level. Which was surprising since they are responsible for the success of the business.

I was told I would receive a Resolution to my concerns but it was never forthcoming. They wanted to ‘kick the can’ once again.

You would think that having raised these concerns and providing an opportunity for these to be resolved, after having been promised a resolution from months and months of tolerating issues and running around like a maniac to resolve problems caused by their systems and services also personally doing everything I could to minimise the impact their services were having on guests, that the leadership team would then accept my 2 Months Notice period.

As soon as they realised they couldn’t improve their service and i wasn’t going to accept them ‘kicking the can’, rather than improve their service provision to a consistently acceptable level, they told me I had decided to Exit their company early.

There was zero goodwill after five years of loyalty as a great Customer.

What they did next was complete unprofessional and unethical. Not only did they impose Exit Fees as a CASH GRAB Two Months before these should have been due, if they were providing an acceptable level of service, they took this money from Guest Reservation Income earned and shuffled those funds across various contracts to ensure they would pay themselves first.

I have never seen behaviour like this. It was a blantant and unashamed cash grab.

After holding me hostage to their service they put a gun to my head weeks before Christmas.

They withheld my income, closed my Calendars so I have no reservations in this new year and refused to unlist the Listings so I couldn’t transfer them to my own account.

They did nothing to mitigate the fact that I was forced to leave them while it was completely their fault.

Even making matters worse during this time the issues caused by their Housekeepers resulted in two of the nine London Apartments I had with them being delisted from Airbnb.

I made a formal complaint to Houst, which my solicitor correctly compiled with proofs of the unreasonable service provision.

My Formal Complaint related to but was not limited to;

(a) admitted breaches of contract and failure to address breaches of contract either properly or at all.

(b) issue of disputed invoices claiming exit fees which are not due.

(c) withholding of money due to me for Guest Reservations.

These are beautifully furnished and maintained Apartments in prime London areas.

You would think the Houst Senior leadership team, after years and years of loyalty from me and with clear evidence of the issues they were causing and an opportunity to provide a resolution would accept they were not providing a service that a reasonable person could consider acceptable. Especially with regular complaints from Guests that I was having to resolve with no end in sight.

Their response to my Formal Complaint was, in the view of my solicitor, a ‘fob off’ and completely failed to address any of the issues they were responsible for causing.

We were amazed to read that the deficiencies of Housts service were down to complexities of property management.

They are not property managers!

After many years of loyalty it was an hard realisation to learn they mistook my good character as tolerance for being bullied. Thinking I was generating goodwill I realise with Houst it only comes down to money.

Perhaps because they have so much debt it clouds their judgement.

Sadly you can be sure that with Houst they will pay themselves first.