Hi there, my tenant is trying to pay her holding deposit but doesn’t know what / have a CAP number?
Certainly the most important question is “who is it for?”
Many times I have proceeded to viewings only to find out that they just try and slip in a reference to their “friend” coming to stay, their parents coming to visit, or their children “just visiting”
Then follow it up with “so, that just you and your partner then, yes?”
You can refer back to this conversation when any other parties appear in their conversation later on. Under the guise of the “oh, I did mention it” callback they often try. This saved me recently from renting to someone who produced a contract in the name of their Limited company they formed a couple of months ago
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like I said previously some tenants will not be upfront
That is most offensive! The Gestapo did not fire “questions”!! Just ask my grandmother.
For those using a ‘screening form’ - when do you send this to the prospective tenant? Is it a) before you even agree to show them the property, or is it b) when they’ve seen the property and express an interest in renting it?
I can see a benefit in a) in eliminating timewasters who just want a look and have no intention of renting, but it is quite a lot of information to ask before a tenant themselves even knows if they’re interested!
I’m new to OpenRent - can someone tell me what contact details you get from prospective tenants? Do you get a phone number so you could have an initial chat before arranging a viewing, or is it all done through messaging?
I do it all thru messaging before a viewing I ask. Are you in work? Is this tenancy for just yourself? Are you a smoker? Do you have pets? Are you with a landlord at present? You can use your own questions depending on what you are looking for> I will not give out my number at first because if you dont go ahead you could be pestered with calls
i Have just thought of an example of asking questions. I have a flat with openrent I have had 14 enquiries. That could have meant 14 viewings. I advertise that you must be in work. Easy to understand you would think. However when I ask thru openrent “are you in work?” out of the 14 there were 12 who were not in work. Most did not reply to my question, so in effect that answered my question. You can see how much time that saved me
Yes , I have found exactly the same. I advise that if they like the house in order to pass referencing they will need to provide proof of income and landlords reference etc etc. I would say that after that advisory email I don’t hear back from about 75% of initial enquiries. I am very polite about it and say that I don’t want either of us to waste our time etc - so that certainly weeded people out!
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Hi, thanks for commenting!
You can ask tenants if they’re happy to share email/phone number, but I really recommend messaging tenants via the OpenRent messenger.
The reason is that if you need to report something to the team, it’s really easy to do it in a few clicks on the messenger. If you are speaking via text and wanted to report something to us, you would have to email us a load of screenshots. Tenants and landlords can easily fake texts and emails too, but it is not so easy to fake messages sent via our site.
So there are some good practical reasons to keep communications ‘on-platform’.
Sam
Hi,
Need help about openrent collecting my tenants rent… Openrent has been collecting my rent and it never arrived into my account. Does anyone know i can get it back? My tenants showed me the account no and sort code they have been sending it to as directed by openrent but i can’t get it back. If anyone knows how to go about it I’d be grateful.
Thanks
Why is your tenant not paying you directly?
Hi Adam, if you contact our customer support team here then we will look into this for you asap.
Sam