You did not apply, and you cannot pay
If you have found this page because your agency appears on one of our city rankings, here is the short version. Agencies are found through public sources, assessed against the same four criteria everywhere, and published. Nobody applies, nobody is invited and nobody pays. There is no advertising on this site, no affiliate link, no sponsored position and no arrangement under which a position can be bought or improved.
If that ever changes, it will be written on every page before it happens rather than after.
How agencies are found
We start from public sources for the city: the letting agent register in Scotland, redress scheme and Propertymark directories, Citylets, Rightmove and Zoopla listing counts, Companies House, review platforms and the search results themselves. That produces a longer list than we publish, usually twenty to thirty agencies for a city.
Agencies are then removed from consideration for concrete reasons, and the reason is usually stated on the page. Recent examples include a client money protection certificate that had expired, a company with a proposal to strike off, a business that no longer trades as a letting agent at all, and several with no verifiable public review base of any kind.
The four criteria
- Review strength. Score and base size together, across more than one platform where possible. A high score on a very small base does not outrank a slightly lower score on a large one.
- Legal compliance. In Scotland, registration and whether the number is displayed as the code of practice requires. In England, redress scheme membership and client money protection, both compulsory, with the certificate checked for expiry.
- Accreditation. Propertymark, RICS, SAL and equivalents, checked on the body's own member search where one exists rather than taken from a logo.
- Fee transparency. Whether a landlord can find out the price without handing over a phone number. Where two agencies are close, the one that publishes goes higher.
What counts as evidence
- Ratings are attributed to the platform they came from and are never averaged across platforms. Where two platforms disagree, both figures are published with their counts, because that gap is information a landlord needs.
- Fees are quoted only from an agency's own published material. Nothing is estimated, and a tariff from one branch is never applied to another.
- Awards are cited only where the awarding body or a contemporaneous report can be identified. An agency claiming a number of awards without naming them gets no citation.
- Claims about scale are separated from listing counts. A live listing count is not a managed portfolio, and the pages say so.
- Anything we could not verify is stated as unverified rather than dropped silently or presented as fact.
How to correct an entry
Email hello@toplettingagents.co.uk with Correction at the start of the subject line. Tell us what is wrong, what it should say, and where it can be verified. A link to your own published page, a certificate, a Companies House record or a member search result is ideal.
Factual corrections are made quickly. The page then carries a fresh checked date, so readers can see it has changed. If a correction changes something material, such as a registration number or a fee, it is corrected everywhere on the site rather than on one page.
Right of reply
If a page states something about your agency that is accurate but that you consider incomplete or unfair, tell us and we will consider adding your response. A short factual reply, published alongside the point it addresses, is usually the outcome. This is not a route to remove a rating you dislike.
Removal policy
Accurate entries are not removed. An entry that is inaccurate is corrected, and if it cannot be made accurate it is removed. An agency that has ceased trading, or that no longer operates as a letting agent, is removed from the ranking and, where it is likely to appear on other lists, is usually noted as no longer trading so that readers are not misled.
We will not remove an entry because it is unflattering, and we will not raise a position in exchange for anything. Neither request offends us. Both are declined.
Updates
Every city page is reviewed monthly. Review counts move daily, certificates expire, franchisees change and businesses are acquired, so figures carry the date they were checked and old figures are replaced rather than accumulated.