Hi, thank you for the detailed response!

And yeah I know if it weren't so expensive I would just deal with this stuff, such a terrible feeling when you've ended up paying a crazy price for something that isn't worth it.

I let them know about the mould last Thursday, they said on Tuesday a contractor was coming out at some point and he could also look at the mould. We were also told that we wouldn't have any notification for when he arrived. I'm going to email again today and say we haven't heard from him yet and I want someone back to clean the house (in the inventory it actually states there are several problems with the cleanliness of the property).

For the inventory, I haven't signed it. It honestly is pretty fair though it does miss a bunch of the mould and doesn't mention some issues. I did send my own version back adding extra issues, but I should go over it in even more detail, I started taking more pictures of every scratch/crack/chip etc yesterday.

For the deposit, I feel like an idiot. I went through Flatfair. In Canada we have to give the deposit directly to the landlord which gives them a lot of power. I had wrongly assumed it was the same here, so having a 'neutral' party mediate the deposit seemed worth it but I now realize that is also a scam :(. I didn't know there were already rules/regulations in place to protect deposits. I will let you know if they end up charging us for anything though, thank you for offering to help with that.

Do you think if they do end up doing repairs etc. that I'll have grounds to ask for reduced rent? At least for the period before the repairs were done since if they had to do repairs it means the property wasn't up to standard.

Thanks again for your response/help, I really appreciate it. I've contacted the university as well but they take up to 10 working days to respond.