I am about to let a flat to a couple from overseas who just moved to the UK. They will pay me 6 months rent in advance because they realise referencing is useless and there is no point me pursuing a guarantor in their home country either, so my security is this advance payment. In this case, is the rent now process simplified so I can skip referencing altogether? I will just rely on doing their right to rent check with passports and the advance payment. It works for me to streamline the process as much as possible and in this case all I would have to do is sign the contract between me and them, no guarantors, and they could move in once cash arrives in both deposit account and my account? Or will the Rent Now system railroad me into doing referencing, which they will fail, and then throw up more unsolveable problems?
Referencing is optional so if you want to you can skip it. Obviously there are risks with this…
Rent Now will still set up your contract. You will be warned automatically about the lack of referencing but it will still proceed. Have you thought about what will happen at the end of 12 months ? It will roll around very quickly .
how do you know wether they have lived here before and have no CCJ s No reference?
What about affordability and job security?
I wouldn’t take the risk personally 
Hi Graham -
Even if you are expecting their references to fail, and are comfortable with rent in advance to cover their lack of credit history / UK guarantor, referencing is still a sensible course of action. It can uncover negatives (like CCJs if they have lied and have been in the UK), as well as confirming data like income sources / employment.
Whilst I appreciate referencing tenants who are currently abroad, or have very recently moved to the UK, is less insightful, it still sounds like it would be useful for confirming what the tenants have told you is true - even if ultimately their lack of credit data or affordability checks will result in a failed report overall.
As others have mentioned, referencing is optional within Rent Now. And even if you do conduct references, which do fail, you can still proceed with those tenants.
Rent Now is never designed to “get in the way”, just to guide landlords and ensure legal compliance. If you ever feel “railroaded”, please do let us know so we can take a look and provide better guidance / options.
I am quite happy and have not felt too railroaded so far but I never took anyone without referencing before so was unsure if the system could handle this, thanks.
I’ve had offers with 6 months upfront rent and scanned copies of their British passports to prove their ID. However, I insisted they do the referencing to ensure they are who they say they are and other referencing details. They did not provide any documents to OpenRent and silently walked away from their offer.
On close inspection of the scanned copies, they were all doctored fakes.
Be careful
OR railroads you,
If it’s an option it certainly is not clear.
Credit referencing is useless if the potential tenants have been outside the UK for more than three years as the system ignores older stuff and the result is " insufficient info - fail"
Only sensible thing is advance rent, fingers crossed.
Remember credit ref only guides and “will pay” is more important than " can pay"
Do you trust them?
Do you mind elaborating on which option you feel isn’t clear?
If you’re referring to starting referencing in Rent Now, then the options look like this:
Obviously skipping referencing is not the normal path for most landlords, and so it’s not the default option, but our aim is for the option (and associated risks) to be very clear for all landlords. Hopefully the choice of those three options when deciding on an application is pretty clear - but we’re always open to improvement ideas!
If you’re referring to accepting failed references, it looks like this:
Incidentally, this is the exact same set of options if the references have failed or passed, so hopefully no “railroading” here, but have put the screenshot here in case others disagree.
If it’s neither of those two scenarios, then please do let us know so we can fix / clear up any confusion that you faced. Thanks!
I would not trust any one with any employment proof.
If there is a genuine tenant they will give all evidence. Why don’t you ask copy of passport with stamps etc,
employment contract and check thoroughly that
employers are genuine and reputable company references.
If not just simple suggestion stay away as you will easily find tenants.
I have done it now and I didn’t find there was any railroading, it was very straightforward.
Yes I can elaborate.
I tried to move the application forward without referencing but seemed to be going in circle. Bearing in mind that one uses this site only occasionally it is a “relearning process” each time and the navigation is not always clear.
I paid ÂŁ40 for two references for people who had been out of the UK for 8 years.
They were unable to upload their UK info as it was out of date and their overseas I do was not accepted. Of course they failed as expected.
ÂŁ40 wasted. I would be glad to get it back!
I trust them and could sign them up anyway.
BTW. Their bank flagged the payment to OR as " suspicious. They had to satisfy the bank that OR is respectable.
There is another issue beyond referencing. If you take 6 months rent up front followed by monthly payments, you will be in breach of the tenant fees act. You can stick with the rent being paid every six months to avoid breaching the act but then your section 21 notice period becomes 12 months. The other option is to issue a fixed 6 month contract and then issue a section 21 notice that requires them to move at the end of the 6 months. They would then have the option to move out or sign a new contract with monthly rent payments.
Actually just realised that my last option doesn’t work as the section 21 notice period is 12 months with a 6 month rent payment
The s21 notice period is capped at 6 months, but you can’t serve a valid s21 in the first 4 months of the tenancy.
Didn’t know there was a cap. Good tip.
good information, thanks. i didn’t go ahead with these guys in the end but seems the six month advance payment needs some kind of premium on the rental to compensate for the additional risk if I ever encounter that situation again.
Hi Carl - I’m really sorry to hear that. I posted the screenshot of the screen above, and the button to “skip references” is aimed to be really clear regardless of device you were using. If you do run into the same issue again, please do contact our team and we can guide you through the process in real-time and check we’ve not missed something. Feel free to refer to this post.
I suspect, but can’t confirm without more details, that this is the standard message all banks show when making a large payment to anyone (company or person). This is standard security messaging. Having said that, a manual bank transfer is not the default method of payment, and we do support both an authorised payment path and card payment path. But I’m not 100% which path your tenants chose, and which bank security issues they ran into - ultimately that’s down to the respective bank - but we do process hundreds of millions of pounds of rent and deposit money without issue!
Hi Tim - I’m not sure where you obtained this information, but our system supports rent in advance followed by monthly payments in a 100% legal manner. There is more information here:
There are extra steps our system takes to ensure this is all legally valid.
I can’t see you’ve ever used our tenancy creation service, so I guess you’re referring to landlords doing this without OpenRent support. Tenancy creation isn’t straight forward (we even sent a recent newsletter on some of the “gotchas”), but our system is designed to ensure every tenancy is set up legally whilst having the flexibility to do things like take advance rent payments.