I have mixed feelings about leaving this review. The staff at Symonds & Sampson were polite throughout, and they ultimately returned my holding deposit in full once we withdrew. However, this experience has left me deeply concerned about the human cost of modern lettings practices. This was a joint application by myself (67, with over 40 years of unblemished renting history) and my daughter (31, a GP working in the NHS). We were not speculative applicants, we were a father and daughter genuinely looking for a suitable home together. I took the very real risk of informing my current landlord that I intended to move and asked for a formal reference. Having done so, I then had the humiliating experience of having to “crawl back” and explain that the application had collapsed through no fault of my own. Two separate households have been affected by this. My daughter, who does not currently live with me, has also had her plans disrupted and we now carry the stigma of a failed referencing process. The application collapsed because of HomeLet, the tenant referencing company used by Symonds & Sampson. HomeLet is a trading name of Barbon Insurance Group (part of the larger PIB Group), a business whose primary focus is landlord insurance and risk management. Their revenue comes from selling insurance products, guarantees, and tenant referencing services to agents and landlords, and tenants. In practice, this creates a strong commercial incentive to flag risks conservatively, even when those “risks” are clearly erroneous. In my case, HomeLet flagged three small CCJs (£169–£250) registered in a female name at a commercial address I have never lived at, never used, and had never heard of. HomeLet themselves later confirmed in writing that the judgments were not in my name. Despite these glaringly obvious mismatches, the process resulted in delays, unresponsive communication, and an eventual demand for a GUARANTOR!! At no stage did anyone appear willing to apply basic human judgment or challenge the clearly flawed output of the automated system. Instead, an insurance-driven process treated false and disputed third-party data as more important than the actual people involved. People are not machines, and tenants are not simply ‘other’; a risk to be managed by algorithm. We are individuals with lives, careers, families and long histories of reliability. The stress, embarrassment and practical disruption this caused (to two households) was entirely avoidable. A returned deposit does not erase the damage. We lost a tenancy we were well suited for. The landlord lost good tenants who genuinely wanted the property. In the end, this profit-driven model appears to serve neither tenants nor landlords particularly well, it simply generates more business for insurers and referencing companies through over-caution, and clearly flawed systems. I hope Symonds & Sampson will reflect on their choice of referencing partner and be more willing to exercise discretion when obvious errors arise. Both tenants and landlords deserve a system that recognises basic humanity rather than defaulting to automated suspicion. *The Agents assert on here that they don’t comment publicly on reviews (except the positive ones that is.) interesting.