Landlord agreed to reduce rent due to corona but

Hi, few months ago my landlord and I decided on reducing the rent as my partner and I were asked to take voluntary paycuts from our employers.

Since then, we’ve been paying the new agreed amount BUT I keep getting emails from OpenRent saying that my account is in arrears.

What needs to be done in this case and I hope this is not passed to credit rating agency.

Contact your landlord to “pause rent reminders” somewhere on their account. Using this features simply stops the reminders going out to you, and does not affect anything else.

This was a new feature that was set up a few months ago that your landlord may not know about. I suggest that you copy this message to the landlord by email.

Open Rent will keep a record of any (possibly reduced) payments that are made. That will make it easier for landlords and tenants to keep track of how much rent can be put into any future repayment plan once the pause period is over. By hitting pause you don’t change the features of Rent Collection in OpenRent - you only pause the emails to the tenants.

The landlord does not have to tell Open Rent about any agreements you have made.

Hi @Fahad1, @John45 is exactly right. This is a guide to using the rent pause feature which you can show to your landlord. Once activated you will no longer receive rent-chasing emails from OpenRent, but any rent you do pay will be kept account of by our system.

Sam

Sam,

OpenRent keep adding new features. Is it not time to notify all landlords and tenants respectively of the changes to your facility that affect them, depending on there nature, or simply to notify us all of each change!?

Also, I suggest that OpenRent have a single location, easily found by ‘advertising’ it to both, where all your features are explained, with a startup guide that unfortunately has to be kept up to date with those changes.

Hi John, thanks for your thoughts on this. Yes – we have certainly been doing a lot of product work in the last few months!

When we make changes to the OpenRent product, we want everyone who might benefit to be aware. Simultaneously, we respect that many landlords and tenants don’t want to receive emails from us every week with a list of everything we’ve been up to!

As a happy medium, we have a monthly newsletter that keeps landlords up to date with all the major changes to OpenRent and the rented sector as a whole. Anyone can sign up to the newsletter here.

The best way, of course, to make sure that new features are used by those who need them, is good product design. This means that users are presented with the solution at the same moment the problem becomes clear.

For example, instead of emailing all our 2,200,000 tenants saying that they can create email alerts for their property searches, or expecting them to find and read a guide, we should suggest the email alert function to tenants just as they are creating their search. This is the approach to new features we try to take: intuitive, unintrusive and helpful.

The Help Centre is a great place to find more info on all OpenRent services and features.

Sam

Many thanks: an excellent approach.