OpenRent create a Bad tenants and a tenant registry

Landlord Discussion
19

Hi Declan, we know that one of landlords’ main concerns is letting to tenants who will pay the rent regularly and treat the property and its furnishings in a tenant-like manner. The best tool landlords have to do this is ordering a professional referencing company to check the tenant. That will include a reference from the previous landlord, which ought to go a long way to finding out what kind of tenant the applicant is.

In general it’s quite tough for companies to find a fair way to set up a peer-reviewing system. I can list some of the problems companies like us face.

  • Timing: When is the right moment to allow customers to review each other? Is it at the viewing? Is it once the tenant has moved in? Is it three months in? Is it when the deposit has been returned? It’s tough to know.
  • Veracity: We don’t really have any way to verify the veracity of some kinds of claims reviews make. E.g. if a tenant claims a landlord has claimed one thing at the viewing then another thing on the tenancy agreement, it’s hard for us to know if this is true or not
  • Symmetry: There would need to be a symmetry between both tenants’ and landlords’ reviewing powers.
  • Fairness: With things like Uber, users may take 100 rides a year. That means if they have a bad day and get a bad review, it is diluted by all their other, good days as a passenger. But people only move or let their property once every 20 months or so on average. One bad review can make a big difference and that might not necessarily be fair.
  • Criteria: Some landlords may think that cancelling a viewing the day before means the tenant deserves one star out of five. For another landlord, they might think it perfectly reasonable to do that and not mind much anyway because they already found a tenant, and so give the tenant five stars for the same behaviour.

These are just some of the things we have to think about before implementing a peer reviewing system. It’s really important to get them all right if we do go for such a solution.

Other users have discussed this before here:

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