HousingAnywhereReviews 198

I had a terrible experience booking a room in Lisbon for one month. The host tried to make me sign a contract for two months and pay double the price. When I called customer service, they friendly informed me that I could ask for a refund. However, they stopped replying to me. After more than a month, they claimed I wasn't eligible for a refund. You can see from the screenshot that I asked for a refund on the 11th of January, and the policy outcome arrived on the 12th of February. In the meantime, I had to spend a lot of money living in a hostel while waiting for a reply and my money back. I called them every two days for an update, but they kept my money while the host was paid for this fraud.

After a my reservation confirmed with landlord I paid first month in advance to make it robots (site policies) after 5 days 21st Feb the landlord said that they want a February rent I have to pay it since my reservation was on 1st of March. If don't they will cancel. I said it is not fare to pay for a month that already has a week left to move in. They cancel the reservation and didn't pay for any damages and funny part is that it took 24 days to refund my money not to mention more than 10 times that I called for the answer.
Overall I strongly suggest not to get involved with this site.

Horrible experience - Took 5 weeks to contact me after they assured me 2 - 5 business days to process a refund for a booking cancellation request
Was emailed once by the so-called financial team and then told they had given my 1800€ away to the advertiser despite never staying there. Beware: they do not care one bit about contract terms and will scam you
AVOID and save your money

TLDR;
Don't use their platform. Total scam.

I booked an apartment for 3 months starting March 2023 over their website.
Exactly 24 hours after the booking confirmation (the period where you can still cancel the booking) the advertiser started ignoring my messages.

After contacting housinganywhere.com support i finally reached them (on the day of the move in).
They were still ignoring all(!) my questions, including me asking for a reason why they ignored my attempts to contact them for a week.

Instead they say "meet you today". How can i move apartments on such a short notice?

According to housinganywhere.com cancellation policy i should be eligible for a refund (their cancellation form even has a checkbox for "unresponsive advertiser" (I'm paraphrasing).

15.16.2.5.
The accommodation is not available for the tenant's use for the agreed lease (for example, there is already someone else in the accommodation or the accommodation does not exist at all); or

15.16.2.6.
The tenant is not able to move into the accommodation due to circumstances that were unforeseeable when the booking was
Made and are not attributable (toerekenbaar) to the tenant within the meaning of article 6:75 of the Dutch Civil Code (force majeure/
Overmacht), but excluding for clarity and without limitation change of plans, travel delays and illness which will remain the risk of the tenant.

But they wont give you a refund, stating:

"Dear Steven,

Thank you for you message, and we are sorry for your unpleasant experience.

At the moment, according to our Terms and Conditions you are not eligible for a refund. Additionally, you still have the opportunity to move-in. We have contacted the landlord. In the listing it is also clearly stated what the move-in date is. Have you tried contacting the landlord again and have another attempt of moving-in.

Best regards,
Gabriel"

Total scam.

If I only knew for this review site before, I would save 700€ which is not even one salary in my country. Nobody will return this to me. They do not give tenants to visit place before moving-in, that's why this thing hapens. They do not even know in which conditions are apartments they advertise. Never again! Very bad experience. Waiting for weeks for theis reply and accusing me to lie...be carefull!
One of their 'most valuable' landlord has accomodation in pictures:

My name is Andres Mercado, I rented a place in Torino with Rosa who was the Landlord, I started to live there on 22 of September 2022. The first installment was paid by Housinganywhere, the day that I arrived we did not sign a CONTRACT, so the Deposit and the other payments were in cash every 22 of the month.

As we did not have a legal agreement in where, I must let her know that we want to leave the home. I wrote her a WhatsApp message on January 7, that indicated that we were leaving her accommodation the 23 of January 2023, as you can see in the PDF with our chat in WhatsApp. Now 07of February, two weeks later of the date that we leave the home, she said that she is going to take the 10 days that we did not use, because we did not let her know that we were leaving.

She is using the booking in Housing anywhere, as a legal support that we must stay in her place until 01 of February. As I read, housinganywhere has not legal solution for this, so as we do not have a contract we can leave the home when we desire.

She took from my deposit 366 euros and as you can see in the WhatsApp conversation she is taking 186 euros in addition to fix the things she said that we "broke". As you can see in the WhatsApp conversation, she also mentioned that she is going to take 50 for cleaning, this price is not included in the sign in housinganywehere, these are not the conditions in your page.

In addition, she signed a paper with me, that indicates, that at 23 of January we had not any other debt with her, as you can see in the PDF, she also has a copy of this agreement. She is taking this money because as she said to me "she cannot find anyone who need the accommodation".

I do not know how much the fixes can cost because she did not give a receipt, in total she gave me back 450 Euros of my Deposit which was 1000 originally.

I just want to let you know, that people like this are everywhere in your portal, so as a recommendation, it will be important that people could see this kind of review, and with this take a better decision. I do not want that more people will be stolen from people like her.

In the beginning everything was fine, I rented a bed in a hostel via their website for 500 eur and 150 eur adminstration fee of housinganywhere. But in fact it turned out not to be as advertised. I emailed to support, where I described the reasons and attached photos to request for refund of room renting.
After a day I got a reply that my request was being processed and it would take a maximum of 2 working days. Half a month passed, I have got neither my money nor house!

Housinganywhere demands money for booking without doing anything they validate scammers as trust worthy. I have been scammed by a partner they have and they said it is a trusted partner. When I came back to them they did not say anything and could not return my money back.

I cannot recommend HousingAnywhere. The tenancy agreement I received imposes rules of conduct on the tenant that cannot legally be included in a tenancy agreement. I was asked to agree to a schedule of charges that would apply if I received a warning about the rules of conduct. One of the rules in the contract states, for example, that the tenant may only host visitors on five days a month and must otherwise pay 60 euros per warning and that the landlord is entitled to terminate the tenancy without notice after a warning. This cannot be enforced by a tenancy agreement and is illegal. In addition, these conditions were not even remotely described in the advertisement placed via HousingAnywhere. So I was not informed of the provisions in the tenancy agreement before booking the room and paying the first month's rent.

Furthermore, not all payments were listed in the payment summary, as an additional service fee of 100€ for the landlord was not included in it.

For these reasons, I revoked the booking a few days after receiving the contract by mail and demanded the payments back. I also reported the landlord on the website. Many phone calls and emails did not get a helpful response as I was told on the phone that I needed to email. In the email responses, they did not address the terms in the tenancy agreement and only referred to the fact that, according to HousingAnwhere, I only have one day to cancel. However, this cannot apply if you are given an illegal tenancy agreement after booking.

The landlord also did not want to pay back the first month's rent, although he still had over a month after my cancellation to re-let the room in Berlin Kreuzberg, which would certainly have been booked again within one day.

All in all, I lost 730€ (1st month's rent + service fee) and am very unhappy with the customer service. It cannot be that you have to pay so much before receiving the rental contract and that it contains illegal clauses. HousingAnywhere writes on the website that they protect you from scammers and help you, but they do not.

I booked a place in Lisbon in August for 6 Months starting in the middle of February 2023. I needed a lease &asked them another couple of things. They referred me to the Landlady who told me that she couldn't do it because of Government regulations. Which I found out wasn't quite true, fair enough. In other words, their mentality is, gimme your money & don't bother us!
I cancelled the place only about 10 days after I booked it & expected a refund. Yes, they returned the money for the rent, but not a PENNY from the "service fee" of 150,- Euros. What did they actually do for me? NOTHING, EXCEPT MAKING ME GIVING THEM THIS WONDERFUL REVIEW!
In very English words, Don't touch them with a barge pole.
Btw, I'm the 1st. One who gives praise & recommendations when I get treated the way it should be!

#HA*******275
Invoice Date 30-08-2022
Booking Reference *******
Settlement
Reference
*******921
First Rent Payment € 400.00
Booking Fee € 150.00
Total € 550.00
Payment Made - € 550.00

This is a scam, you technically pay 25% of the rent fee which in my case was 400 euros only to learn later that they are a mediator. They just post properties on a website and then not clearly state the full payments needed to be paid. Extra charges and deposits were required at my check-in which were unclearly stated in their overall payment.
Eventually I had to pay double the amount that was mentioned initially at the booking, because of their manipulative way of stating the charges and fees in the payment overview. I tried to write them, but there was no answer! So I had to call them.

The experience was horrible, unprofessional and not transparent at all - such websites need to be put down, especially when student book through them!

After my stay there has been an issue of the deposit refund. Housing Anywhere states that this is not their concern and they can do nothing to aid me. More so they do not make reviews of the landlord visible on their page making it impossible to truly know if there have been prior issues with a landlord making my review and many others meaningless as well as attempting to mitigate these issues impossible

I booked a room at housinganywhere. The foto's and video's are looking good on forehand.
But when I arrived is was horrible. Coackroaches, broken furniture, and the everything in the kitchen was broken. At the day I arrived there was police because the landlord was roughing out al the stuff of one of my roommates. Housinganywhere is not helpful at all. You pay 150 bookingcosts for the service. But if you call them to cancell they say you had to call them earlier. Housinganywhere give you 48 hours after you moved in. I moved in the 23th of August but my contract started at the 15th, so I should have cancell the booking a week before I arrived.

Housinganywhere didn't return any deservered refund to me and 95% of their advertisements are from Italian real-estate agents (Stefano & Teresa & Garbiela). The 3 persons work together in an office in "ul. Dietla 57, Krakow, Poland" while Stefano is the boss. This is a terrible agent who would steal your money and would make lease agreements that include ridiculous points that guarantee they earn maximum amount of money from you in all situations, and he doesn't respect any appointments as he can be late for any appointment with 6 or more hours. He threatens everyone who tries to reject such apartments after visiting them by law or going against GDPR and he doesn't return deserved refunds in such cases. He is the rudest impolite person I've ever seen in my life. Please serve your self and avoid these thiefs.

They have strict rules to avoid you to agree on an on site view of the apartment and contacts to speak directly. So basically you are obliged to pay at least a month rent (!) before you can know if the apartment even exists... They only control (very actively) that you conclude the deals trough the site and call you every time an offer is sent to you. They read all your conversations and call you commenting them. Very risky. And they tell is to protect you... They protect only themselves from losing their commissions. Stay far from this

Was charged additional fees by the landlord that weren't shown on housing anywhere. They refused to lift a finger to help. There are also no reviews that you can leave of the place itself

I booked a room a while ago and I am moving in in a few days, however the landlord just suddenly cancelled my booking. How am I supposed to find a new place in a few days and they are not taking any responsibility. I already wasted 52 euros on the subscription and all I get are troubles. Many places on the website said room available but are actually not available. Scam your subscription fee money and not helpful at all.

I got a place through them, it was awful and expensive besides they don't accept kids. So you can find better options out there. I don't recommend their services.

I paid 2200 EUR of first month payment plus 500 EUR fees to Housinganywhere to book a flat in Munich. The host asked me about 4 400 EUR of deposit to be paid IMMEDIATELY before even signing the rental contract and before seeing in what state is the apartment. The host informed me about the immediate payment of the deposit of course after 24 hours from booking. So, the site refused to reimburse the fee and the rental payment. BE CAREFUL, it much safer to go on AIRBNB! HOUSINGANYWHERE is a SCAM! They take responsibility for nothing. The call person from the site confirmed me that my case is very common

Ma fille loue une chambre en coloc du 2 juillet au 6 août pour initialement 550 euros de loyer... des frais et une caution... Que housinganywhere décide de conserver car le mois d'aout commencé est dû dans sa totalité! Aucun contact et aucun recours possible d'ailleurs le 'propriétaire ' n'est pas un particulier mais un intermédiaire pour une entreprise aussi importante qu'anonyme et dont nous ne pouvons avoir le nom ou les coordonnées. 1000 euros au final soit 2 mois de loyer et frais pour une étudiante c'est juste totalement révoltant! Il est indispensable que toutes les universités françaises relaient cette information stopper cette arnaque!