Is OpenRent registered with Rental Exchange?

I’d like to pay my rent via Rental Exchange, which allows tenants o use their monthly rental payments towards credit history. Does anybody know if this can be done via OpenRent?

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Hi,

We don’t partner with Rental Exchange here and I can see the team have been in touch on this point by email.

Any other questions, just let me know!

George

Is there any way that paying my rent through OpenRent will improve my credit score?

Hi Bronwen, we don’t currently offer this, but there are independent companies you can use at the same time as being an OpenRent. One is CreditLadder, which was founded by someone who used to work with OpenRent.

Speaking personally, here’s my understanding of these services in general.

These rent recognition companies say say “put your rent towards your credit score” so they can collect data on you financial activity. They then sell that information to credit-reporting companies e.g. experian. Then, once the credit company has enough data from enough tenants, they will see if any correlations exists between your tenant behaviour and your future credit behaviour: e.g. do tenants who pay their rent on time end up being more reliable borrowers later on? Do people who paid their rent on time every month for 5 years then go on to pay their mortgage on time?

Intuitively, we say yes, reliable tenants graudate into reliable mortgagers, but lenders who buy that data want to see real world behaviour, not mjust assumptions, otherwise they would already be offering better deals to reliable tenants.

Given all of this, it is probably still too early on for these ‘rent recognition’ services to translate into better credit deals later on, since not enough data has been collected to identify significant correlations and predict ex ante credit bahviour. So at the moment, signing up to these rent recognition services means that a company is collecting your financial data and selling it, while also trying to up sell you to pay £15 a month to get benefits like £5 off pizza express.

It’s possible this will change very soon, however, so we are keeping an eye on how things are developing. Thanks for sharing your views on this; if lots of our tenants indicate this is something they want, then it’s likely we’ll add it to our rent collection service.

I hope that helps!
Sam

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Helpful insight. Thank you for the details.