Can we turn off people putting down holding deposits?

[Daz]

@Richard79

Fwiw I do want to use rent now, but I want to be able to turn it on for the applicant once I have vetted them.

I understand the thinking, and discussed this a little here:

Unwanted Holding Deposits

We do ask tenants to confirm they’ve viewed the property, as well as make it clear they are not holding the property, simply putting forward an application which the landlord ultimately decides on. There is no obligation made to the tenant until a landlord accepts a holding deposit. In terms of your suggestion, if it was to be that a landlord had to confirm a tenant prior to them starting their application, the issues would be potentially clunky/painful. For example, if you enabled userA@examp…

As with many things in software, the two objectives are in conflict here. Having both strict restrictions, and wanting ease of use / no back-and-forth / explaining / problem solving, is the challenge. Hopefully that’s explained fairly clearly in my linked post, and clearly we need to do a better job of explaining this on the site itself (as with many things!) for those that have concerns.

Ultimately most landlords are simply telling tenants, either at a viewing or via a message, to go to the advert and press Rent Now if they want to proceed. This is super easy to do verbally or in a message, and solves the needs of 99% of landlords, which is what we’re aiming for.

Any unwanted applications are (hopefully) super easy to cancel, and we will continue to try and improve the messaging / penalties to prevent unwanted applications for the tiny number of tenants that ignore the warnings, and clearly wind up some of our community forum members!