The list is very basic. For example, I had to decline based on the number of tenants exceeding the max occupancy. The closest option was “I don’t accept families” which is not true. I had to end up reviving the declined enquiry and re-decline it with the “Other” option and write my own message. Please add more options or make the custom option the default.
I did not expect OpenRent to write a message posing as me saying “Sorry, I don’t accept families”. I did not write such a discriminatory message yet the prospective tenant(s) will now think I have, potentially opening up liability as well besides being embarrassing and giving landlords a bad name. If you MUST write system messages, clearly indicate in the UI that they are generated and sent by the system, do not under any circumstances impersonate a user.
I usually message the tenants before declining the application, by selecting ‘other’ reason. The prefilled list are useless and can cause us trouble (being discriminatory)
Thanks David. That’s exactly the type of liability the current user flow opens us up to. In this case it’s a studio to 1 bed flat conversion and a family of 3 applied; the property simply cannot accommodate that number of occupants. In fact, OpenRent filters should have caught that based on the max occupancy I entered and I should never have received the enquiry. Exceeding the max occupancy cannot be that rare a rejection reason, but OpenRent has no pre-selected option for it. Really it’s the impersonation of the landlord from the system message that I find most upsetting, that caught me by surprise. From now on I will either have to leave the enquiries open or reject with “other” all the time, making the dropdown a useless barrier.
I did message the tenant as well before declining thankfully. Then the system message gives a different reason all of a sudden but to the applicant it looks like I wrote it. And with a declined enquiry, you cannot message any further, so I had to revive it to fix it. It needs a redesign.
The “Other” reason is available but why would I have chosen that at the time if a more appropriate reason of “Tenant doesn’t match my tenant preference filters” exists.
I’ll strictly use “Other” from now on to have some control over the messages but you can see the issue with the design then. If the drop-downs are meant to save the landlord time, present the custom free-text option more clearly as an alternative, and also allow the user to create their own canned responses.
And as for no need to revive the enquiry, that’s false, because once the enquiry has been declined (with the poorly worded system message), OpenRent disables the chat and no more messages can be exchanged. The landlord is forced to revive the enquiry if they want to clarify the rejection reason message which OpenRent forces us to give.
Even the small light contrast warning “This message will be sent to the tenant” isn’t accurate because it slightly changes the wording of what’s shown to you in the dropdown and what it shows to the recipient. It also doesn’t inform you that it will be sent to the user from your account, as if you wrote it, rather than it being a system message.
