We can only see if we get an answer
Whenever Local authority ask for residents views(consultation) they still go ahead and do what they want to do anyway. Ticking boxes only. We can only see if your views count for anything , notice I said your views .I have not used O R for a long time
Hi all. Thank you very much for taking the time to share your thoughts here. Do keep these coming and we’ll provide some responses once we’ve given all the feedback a good read 
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Openrent could generate significant income from venturing seriously into rent a room advertising to extend its platform. Currently the costs associated with advertising each room in a shared house are prohibitive and uncompetitive compared to Spareroom. Limiting the amount of rooms offered with each advert would prevent abuse of the platform from large corporates with 10 or 20 rooms per block, whilst allowing Landlords with small or medium sized HMO’s an alternative to Spareroom. A lack of completion in this sector is seriously undermining protection for landlords.
Applicants using Spareroom are un verified often detailing over a 100 destinations to reside and are simply harvesting Landlords data. SpareRoom refuse to limit the amount of destinations each individual can seek accommodation, so allowing data harvesting of the general Landlord population. Can Openrent consider a cost effective alternative as currently we only use the platform for single, whole property advertising.
Why is there no phone number to contact a landlord to arrange a viewing? Surely the landlord should have a verified way of contacting them.
Otherwise you have to rely on messaging them on here - which is terrible as you can message them, they take ages to reply, then open rent allows you to chase up the message ONCE after 48 hours of them not replying. What a time wasting and lengthy process.
Surely if the landlord takes 48 hours to reply then gets chased up and then they just have the option to keep ignoring you then its pointless. Why not do something to address this?
When it comes to the property filters for tenants, please add more options. Most importantly: the ability to set the number of tenants so anything with a max tenancy below that is filtered out (currently driving myself crazy looking for a room for 2). Also the option to set a min duration! Thanks
If the Landlord ignore’s your enquiry, they are not interested in your application. I appreciate it might be impolite not to respond, but the Landlord is under no obligation to reply to your enquiry.
As a Landlord, I would not want telephone enquiries. They are more difficult to manage & calls might be received at inconvenient times.
You need to appreciate that Landlords might have jobs or other commitments. Enquiries need to be handled around these.
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YES - no deposit without landlord approval!
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When adding specific conditions to the tenancy agreement, it basically gets prefaced with a box that says these probably aren’t enforceable. Not all that helpful if they well are documented conditions of a headlease.
I won’t use the standard agreement again.
If they had landlords phone numbers, even dedicated ones, i would quit openrent immediately.
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Hi @Graham,
Get rid of voice messaging.
Thanks for your response. It would be helpful if you could expand on why voice messaging isn’t working for you. We currently present this as an option to give some flexibility to those enquiring.
If you let us know what’s bad about it - we can look to improve it.
Hi @Karl11,
You need to communicate better with your loyal customers. As a Landlird who has used you multiple times, it annoys me that you change things without telling us. examples include pricing, change in how deposits are handled, change in advertising portals.
You should be proud of your changes and communicate them either directly, or via this forum or a blog. Instead you do them under the radar, for us only to find out about them when we process our next listing.
Thanks for this. Transparency is key to us, especially in our pricing, and is something we look to prioritise as mentioned on our About Us page. Where there is a key change that will impact how people interact with OpenRent, we’ll be sure to let you know.
You also need to have better customer service. Too many people on here complaining about lack of response or poor quality responses from your team. I too have had email responses that don’t answer the question. I’ve suspected ai is used, rather than an email from a real person.
We’re always looking to improve our customer service so this is noted! We track things like how efficiently customer queries are responded to, all of which is fed back to the team. We’ll always endeavour to get back to our users the same working day where possible.
Rest assured it’s only humans responding - parts of our responses may be pre-written to account for common questions we get frequently but a human is always going to give the sign off.
Hi @Mark10,
There’s been a fair few complaints about gas engineers and electricians booked through OR. Many no shows and not able to follow up with anyone once they’ve gone. Seems direct communication is poor or not possible.
When a service is booked through OpenRent, we’ll create a direct messaging thread between you and the supplier - so direct communication is certainly possible! If a supplier does not show up, we will of course facilitate rearranging or refunding the order.
We ask for feedback after every job - we incentivise suppliers who receive positive feedback and take appropriate action to suppliers who consistently receive poor feedback.
I do not like that the screening questions automatically turn on after so many enquiries. It cannot be turned off. Atleast allow landlords to turn it off. I rely on my auto responder for custom screening questions. Instead currently the tenant has to first answer the system basic screening questions and then my own questions. Too many steps.
Currently this is enabled when a listing reaches a certain number of enquiries and cannot be turned off after that. The intention here is to screen out potentially unsuitable or lower quality enquiries which don’t match the specifications set in your listing. We have a maximum number of enquiries as per our Fair Use Policy so we want to do what we can to avoid hitting this too quickly.
Are you finding that applicants are complaining that this is too many steps? Or do you think it’s not working as well as it could in terms of filtering out the unsuitable enquiries.
I’ll post a separate comment about the Rent Now button as it’s come up a few times.
Hi @David122,
I always like to phone applicants immediately after their inital enquiry to quickly run through the filtering questions. You get a much clearer picture and usually more honest, unrehearsed answers by doing so. This no longer appears to be an option, so I suggest you makes changes to allow it.
Your suggestion here is noted. Do you find that applicant’s responses in the enquiry threads are dishonest?
I’d also suggest more frankness about the risks and legal requirements of being a landlord and full disclosure of the areas you dont cover and on which the landlord should seek further information/support.
In every step of our process we cite relevant legislation, have a library of compliant help guides (and legal guides) and release relevant blog posts and newsletters about legal compliance and upcoming changes to the law. We want to help landlords out as much as possible to be legally compliant but we’d expect that they engage with the materials we’re offering.
If there’s a specific area you think we’re not covering then do let us know and we can create or update our guidance - or if you think this would be better in different formats (e.g. videos) then do let us know.
Hi @Kathy2,
Thanks for the thoughts and suggestions here! These are actually all things being looked into currently.
Hi @YourIdealTenant,
Put landlords ratings now!
This is something we’d love to do and have looked into a decent amount, but as @Mark10 has mentioned this is very hard to police and prevent abuse of. Rest assured, it’s something on our radar.
What kind of stuff do you usually find is missing? We complete the references using the information that the tenant provides us - if there is something missing it’s because the tenant likely hasn’t given us enough or the right information.
A lot of the work in this area for us is ensuring the referencing form is as easy as possible for the tenant to complete so it’s done right the first time.
Price increases are way too sharp.
Prices have also gone up for us too, unfortunately! We absorb these costs where we can but this is not always possible or feasible from a business perspective.
Hi @Stephen93
Openrent could generate significant income from venturing seriously into rent a room advertising to extend its platform.
This is a change we’ve made recently, you can find our announcement and guide linked below.
This is a relatively new feature, so we’re certainly open to feedback for how to develop this further.
There were a few comments about the presence of the Rent Now button on each listing page.
A Rent Now button is present on all OpenRent listing pages and this cannot be disabled. However, tenants are instructed that they need permission of the Landlord to use that feature. When a potential tenant presses the Rent Now button, landlords are instantly notified by SMS and email and given the opportunity to either progress the application, or cancel it at no cost to either party.
There is no obligation to use any of our services, and you are of course welcome to handle referencing, contracts, deposit protection and rent collection yourself.
Your property advertising is not affected by the tenant’s application unless you take no action.
For us, Rent Now is one of our main services and means we can offer a guarantee to tenants that their money will be kept secure and that a legally sound tenancy will be created for them if they use this feature.
However, we hear you. It’s annoying when a tenant places a holding deposit without permission. Whilst we’re not currently looking at removing this button, we can certainly look to make it clearer that the landlord’s permission is required to use this.
An example would be if the tenant hasn’t verified income. Open Rent will send the credit report marked “completed” with “income not verified” (hence a failed application). I would appreciate if Open Rent chased the tenant first - rather than just sending a “failed” report. I’ve had reports back the same day stating failed based on the above hence there can’t have been any chasing for info.
General economy prices increased on average 9% for 2 years in a row, then average around 3-4% (some things, such as food, went up way more than that of course). Open Rent put credit checks up 50% in one go and advertising up over 40%. Not sure that’s quite in line with a fair increase. But I totally accept that I haven’t seen your company accounts and could be way off.
Chatgpt is massively flawed, but a quick search stated this: According to Company Check, OpenRent Ltd’s net worth grew from £1.9 million in 2020 to £16.8 million by April 2024. This growth reflects a substantial increase in the company’s financial standing over a four-year period.
It appears they’re doing very well.
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