REVIEW: Private accommodation on 6 Elmore Road, Broomhill

Dear students/prospective students

I am a graduate of UoS and have been living in Broomhill for 2 years out of my 5 years in Sheffield. However, I am here to warn you about what you are in for if you happen to stumble upon this accommodation and decide to make it your second home during your stay in Sheffield.

A bit about the accommodation. It is owned by a private landlord from Sri Lanka who only rent the place out to asian postgraduates. It is a 3 story house consisting of 7 bedrooms. The rent is set at £70/week and most tenants come from China who does Management since the department is just up the road.

When I first moved in, internet was broken. I asked the current tenants and they said this issue has been going on for months and they had to visit the library to get things done. The landlord knew about the problem but it sure did seem like nothing was done to it at all. I had to contact the internet provider myself to get it sorted and 2 months after that, with a change in provider, the internet was fixed. As the house was big, rooms on the top floor receive poor wifi signal, hence a router was installed but unfortunately it stopped working. This took the landlord a full YEAR to replace it after promising us that he will get us a new one, but only manage to obtain a used one from a friend who works in Information Commons who claims that it was an unwanted router after an upgrade from the university. How convenient...

During my house viewing, he promised me that the house will be provided a brand new flat screen TV in the dinning hall, back garden cleared up for us to have BBQ during summer time and so on, but all did not happen throughout my whole 2 years there. The box TV that we had broke down and was replaced by another box TV from the landlord's spare room. The back garden is filled with junk, bricks and tree branches from his DIY to the house. It did not turn out to be what I would expect from his promises during the first day.

This is a semi-detached house so YES, your landlord will be your neighbour. We pay all bills (electricity, gas and water). For the water bills, he was crafty enough to set up a "fixed rate" for our house, but a metered one for his. He will use the tenants' side pipeline to do his gardening, car washing, and cleaning for both houses which in my opinion, is quite dishonest. What say you? Imagine, how much money he had saved throughout the years as a landlord with this kind of arrangement. We are basically footing his water bills! The parking garage is on the tenants' side too and he parks his car there. So, no parking space for us.

Other minor things are walls are thin, no double glazing on top of poor heating systems (rooms are huge so don't expect a warm room during winter), old/used furnitures (if you have been in UoS long enough, you will notice the chairs in each room are unwanted ones from the IC) etc. And it is always difficult living with strangers as things gets dirty and nobody cleans up (both kitchen and the toilet). The windows have no security latches to prevent thieves from over-opening and entering as it is only a drag-up-and-down window. Unfortunately, my laptop was stolen during my stay there and there has been another break in incident too a year ago.

Well at the end of the day after all those ordeals and challenges, I got my degree. No matter how I unhappy I am, this place still served as my second home in UoS. I am only here to inform you all that perhaps you lot do not need to go through what I have been through and finish your uni life on a higher note.

Please feel free to drop by and ask any questions as I will try my very best to answer yours.

xx