It seems that there is no option for tenants arriving from outside the UK to pay the holding deposit if they don’t have a UK debit card; most will not as they don’t yet have a UK address to open a UK bank account. OpenRent’s “advice” is to encourage them to ask a friend to pay it for them, which is completely unrealistic for many, not to mention extremely unprofessional. Reading back through these discussions it appears that this has been an issue for several years, and OpenRent have still not worked out a solution! This is very poor. Does anyone have any (sensible) suggestion of a workaround?
I encountered this last year. The prospective
tenant was able to withdraw money from an ATM using his foreign credit card, and paid me the one week’s holding deposit in cash.
Then he told me a few days later he’d found somewhere he liked more, and I could keep it.
Happy days 
There are genuine good prospective non-uk tenants who
have good employment and reference. I have one non-uk
tenant who paid the holding deposit from his EU account
and then remainder 1st month rent and deposit too.
He showed me all the documents where he was offered job and going to start. I wrote directly to that company. He had been a very good tenant and also renewed the tenancy contract.
Not all tenants are bad but when you get one really nasty experience with nightmare tenants then it makes us thousand times for the next tenant.
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