Flat listing is cheap and the landlord wants a holding fee before I'm allowed to view it. Normal or not?

#1Priya V(Joined Apr 2026 · 14 posts)July 21, 2026, 6:26 pm

I need a sanity check from people who are less desperate than me, because I have to be out of my current place by the end of August and I am not thinking straight.

Found a one bed, decent area, about fifteen percent under everything else I have seen for the same size. Photos are lovely, description is well written, no typos, nothing that screams fake. I messaged and got a reply within about four minutes, which honestly impressed me at the time.

Then it went odd. The landlord says he is working overseas on a contract and his "property manager" handles viewings, but the manager is away until the following week, so to hold it for me I would need to send a holding fee first, refundable if I don't take it. It is not a huge amount. He has sent me a tenancy agreement already, fully filled in with my name on it, which felt weirdly official and made me feel rude for hesitating.

Part of my brain is saying this is fine and competitive markets are just like this now. The other part is saying I am about to send money for a flat I have never stood inside. Which part is right?

#2Grace H(Joined Mar 2025 · 31 posts)July 21, 2026, 7:44 pm

The second part. Always the second part.

Nobody who genuinely owns a flat needs your money before they will let you look at it. That is not a market condition, it is a step that exists purely so the money arrives before the truth does.

#3tomd52(Joined Jun 2025 · 19 posts)July 22, 2026, 7:15 am

Do the reverse image thing on the photos before you do anything else. Save one, drop it into an image search, see where else it turns up. I did that for my niece last year and the same kitchen was on a property site two hundred miles away, listed for sale, different price, different everything.

Also copy a sentence from the description, put it in quote marks, search that. Copied adverts fall over fast when you make them prove they are original.

#4Dana WhitakerFraud examiner(Joined Feb 2025 · 89 posts)July 22, 2026, 10:38 am

Priya V said:

he has sent me a tenancy agreement already, fully filled in with my name on it, which felt weirdly official

Do not send the holding fee. Everything you have described is the standard rental listing fraud script, and the document is the part I want to address first, because it is doing the most work on you.

A tenancy agreement is a template. It takes about ninety seconds to fill in a name and an address on one, it costs the sender nothing, and it is not evidence of ownership, authority to let, or the existence of a tenancy. Its only function in this script is to move you psychologically from "enquirer" to "tenant", so that hesitating now feels like breaking an arrangement rather than declining an offer. That feeling of rudeness you described is the intended product. Notice it and set it aside.

The rest of the pattern, item by item. The price is under market because a below-market listing generates volume and fast decisions, and volume is the business model. The overseas contract is the load-bearing lie, because one backstory then explains why he cannot meet you, why nobody can show you round, why keys would have to be posted, and why payment has to come first. The unavailable property manager is the same device wearing a suit. The four minute reply is not keenness, it is somebody working a lot of enquiries at once.

There is one thing worth separating out, because a lot of people conflate them. Holding deposits themselves are a real and lawful thing in many places, and a genuine agent may well ask for one. The distinction is not the fee, it is the sequence. In a legitimate letting the holding deposit comes after you have viewed the property and been offered it, is paid to an identifiable business you can look up, and comes with written terms saying under what circumstances it is returned. Here it is being asked for before viewing, by an individual you cannot verify, with "refundable" as a spoken promise. That is the whole difference.

What I would do in your position, in order. Reverse image search the photographs and the advert text, as tomd52 said. Look the address up independently and see whether it is currently on the market for sale, because hijacked sale listings are the most common source of these photographs. Then verify the person, not the story: find the letting agency through its own website or a professional register and telephone the number published there, never a number given to you in the advert, and ask directly whether they are letting that address. If it is a private landlord, ask for proof of ownership and photo identification before any money is discussed, and if the answer is offence rather than paperwork, that is your answer.

Longer version of all of this, including the variants where a real person shows you a real flat they have no right to let, is written up in rental and property deposit scams.

One limit on what I can tell you: I have no way to know whether this specific advert is fraudulent, and neither does anyone else on the internet. What I can say is that the sequence being asked of you is the one that fails, and you lose nothing by insisting on the correct order.

#5Priya V(Joined Apr 2026 · 14 posts)July 22, 2026, 1:02 pm

Reverse image searched. Same living room, same weird corner radiator, on a sale listing from March under a different address in a different city.

I feel a bit sick, mostly because of how close I was and how reasonable he sounded. Also because I had already told my current landlord I had somewhere lined up.

#6quilterjean(Joined Sep 2025 · 22 posts)July 22, 2026, 4:30 pm

Please don't do the thing where you decide this says something about you. You were given a plausible story while under a real deadline, which is precisely the situation these are built for. The deadline was true, that is what made the rest work.

Report the listing to the site before you close the tab. It will still be up, and somebody else with an August move date is reading it right now.

#7Priya V(Joined Apr 2026 · 14 posts)August 14, 2026, 9:55 am

Update for anyone who finds this later. Reported the listing, it came down about five days afterwards. I asked him, before I blocked him, whether he could do a live video walk round the flat instead of the fee, and he stopped replying mid conversation, which was its own kind of confirmation.

Found somewhere else in the end, slightly smaller, slightly more expensive, viewed it on a wet Tuesday with the actual agent, saw the actual damp patch behind the door. Boring and real beats perfect and remote. Moving next week.