Matthew Gray Property Services Director
As students pack up their worldly belongings to head home for summer, there are items they quite wisely choose to leave behind.
Scotland’s leading legal, financial and property specialists Pagan Osborne has unveiled a list of the top ten strangest items its team has found when inspecting recently departed student accommodation in and around Edinburgh and St Andrews.
Items on the list include a torture chair, a blow-up doll and a giant butcher statue.
Matthew Gray, Property Services Director at the firm which has six offices in Edinburgh and Fife, said: “It is astonishing the stories the team comes back with after inspections of student flats around this time of year.
“There is certainly what can only be described as a diverse and interesting array of items that don’t make it back to parents’ homes for the summer. I can only imagine the nights out and pranks that led to these items finding their way into the living rooms, bedrooms and halls of these properties.”
Almost half of the properties Pagan Osborne team manages are student lets.
The leftover items include:
- A torture chair
- A blow-up doll
- A 7ft statue that stood outside a butcher shop
- A bathroom hand wash basin... in a living room
- A tumble dryer... in a bedroom
- A toilet... in a hallway
- Traffic signs and cones
- A television that did not belong in the property
- Multiple brief cases
- Underwear
Leaving ‘gifts’ for the landlords does not help students bribe the return of a full deposit. Around 10% will receive their full deposit back, and 65% get the majority of it.
Only 1% of tenants will get no deposit back at all, with the remainder receiving a partial deposit back. In five years,
Pagan Osborne has had just two cases of tenants who have received none of their deposit back.
Pagan Osborne was recently crowned Property Team of the Year at the Legal Awards.
Matthew added: “You can instantly tell the properties that mum has been in with her scrubbing brush from the ones where the students have just packed up their bags and left. That said, the vast majority are not left with irreparable damage or a mess that is not easily cleaned.”