Can we turn off people putting down holding deposits?

[Ase]

You’re missing the point I’m a tenant looking but I’d never put a deposit down first because many pictures are catfished or years old lol ?.

[Colin3]

That view is the minority of landlords . But whatever works for you

[Blondie.1]

Yes once a holding deposit is placed it takes it off the market (Zoopla, OR, Rightmove etc) immediately

[Richard79]

Can anyone from OR confirm the last post? Ref it being taken down immediately. I’ve cancelled those that have done so, but would be good to know. I’ve had an awful lot of applications who fail basic affordability checks, so enabling them to pause advertising would be ridiculous.

If it does work like that it would be easily abused by a competitor advertising a similar property.

[Daz]

@Blondie.1

Yes once a holding deposit is placed it takes it off the market (Zoopla, OR, Rightmove etc) immediately

This is not true. If someone requests to place a holding deposit it does not affect your advertising.

Furthermore, it does not prevent further applicants requesting to place a holding deposit.

You can’t proceed with Rent Now with more than one set of tenants. So when you pick who to proceed with, the system automatically cancels the other applications and suspends advertising. But this is an active landlord action and decision.

This is all explained when a tenant requests to proceed, the landlord is always in control of the application as you’d expect, and a tenant can’t impact your advertising or other tenants ability to proceed by initiating Rent Now.

[Daz]

In terms of the original question posed here, I’ve explained the reasons for our current set up in a fair amount of detail here for those that are genuinely interested:

Unwanted Holding Deposits

Thanks for the feedback all - really appreciated. Furthermore, the message you have to send to tenants when returning their holding deposit has a hard-coded first line which reads like you’re rejecting their whole application. You then have spend half the rest of your message explaining this. Yep - this was built with our most common use case in mind, where a landlord is rejecting an application outright. Where a landlord doesn’t wish to use Rent Now and wants to explain this to tenants, or …

As per that post and subsequent discussion, we continue to make improvements to our service all the time, but all these decisions have trade offs, and many of the voices in this thread don’t represent the majority of users who do rely on Rent Now.

Hopefully the previous explanations are helpful and happy to engage with genuine follow-up questions if anything isn’t clear or there is something we’ve missed.

[Colin3]

There you go ,all explained well. Amazing how myths abound , and this is nothing compared to the world rumour mill.

[Blondie.1]

I always post current photos ie. when I did the last check in -albeit this shows an empty property. I tend not to use current tenant photos as most don’t showcase a property as I would want it to look. Cluttered in most cases

[Richard79]

Thanks for the explanation. 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.

Just having the option to turn it off by default and enable it for an applicant would be the best option for me. This wouldn’t affect anyone who does choose to leave it on.

I’m finding that most applicants that apply do not pass vetting anyway, so there’s no way I’d put random people thru for paid credit checks etc.

[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!