Today the automatically generated Openrent contract for my latest new tenant had added that in addition to 1 month advance rent and deposit to be paid, there is an ADDITIONAL 28 days rent to pay, so that it is nearly TWO months rent in advance, not one month. There is nothing on the website about this and it’s NOT in the sample contract. My new tenants have objected to this. Does anyone know why this has suddenly appeared ?? The 28 days wording was not in the AST contract for another of my flats, signed only a few weeks ago. I intend to delete the 28 additional rent clause and reissue the contract. Does ANYONE have any info at all on this or had the same experience ? - Paul
I can’t comment on this beyond saying that I agree this is very strange.
Can you paste the paragraph here? I’ve just generated a new Openrent contract today and I can’t see that there is a 28 day additional rent requirement.
Hi @Paul58
While I don’t want to discuss the specifics of your tenancy agreement in a public forum, I do want to clarify exactly what happened.
When drafting the contract you proposed moving the date that rent would be due from the day of the month the tenancy started to a different date. Moving the payment date requires a pro-rata rent payment to cover the intervening period.
I understand that you contacted our customer support team who have explained this in more detail and offered guidance on how you can revert to a standard contract, if you wish to do so.
We also explain more about moving payment dates and pro-rata rent in our help centre:
Yes thank you Beth. It is now clear. Somehow the rent payment date was set at 2 days before the tenancy start date. I don’t recall doing this myself so I assumed the ‘2 days before’ date was auto generated. However to be fair to Openrent it is possible that it was changed by accident during the process. I now understand that if landlords do not have the tenancy start date and the rent due date as the same, it will generate an additional initial part-month payment in addition to the month’s rent in advance (and in addition to the deposit). So now it’s clear. Thanks to Openrent for clarifying. I did suggest there might be a ‘further info’ link next to the pull down menu where landlords choose the rent payment date, with perhaps a warning about this, recommending that the rent payment date and tenancy start date are the same. Best wishes to all at Openrent.