Hi,
I am new to OpenRent and I am a new Landlord.
My question to the community is, Has anyone purchased and used OpenRents Rent Guarantee Insurance.
I have carried out tenant referencing via OpenRent and the tenants both passed as long as one of them provides a Guarantor which they subsequently done.
Just thinking that I could purchase RGI with the money I have saved by not using a high street letting agent.
Look forward to your replies.
Hi Mike, I was waiting to see if anyone other landlords could offer an opinion before jumping in!
We think the RGI offer (£89 for a year) is a really great product for landlords. We’ve been able to get such a good policy for our landlords because of our scale. We know it gives landlords peace of mind that their rental income will continue for the whole period.
Did you decide to buy it in the end?
Sam
Hi Sam
Thank you for your reply. I decided to buy the policy without getting any replies from the forum.
Hopefully I will not have to use it.
Mike
You won’t. The companies who sell rent insurance are careful to exclude any applicant who is likely to become a claim. So you end up able to only insure the rent of tenants who are highly unlikely to generate a claim. (Which makes it pointless. Which is why experienced portfolio landlords don’t use it.)
Hi Abdul, our RGI is available to every tenancy where the tenant (or their guarantor) has passed referencing, so the policy is very widely available for OpenRent landlords.
Hi Sam
To be honest (and a bit more transparent) it isn’t your/OpenRent’s RGI, it’s an insurance company’s product (Rentguard??) for whom you act as paid affiliates/introducers and which would be commercially available to anyone (for the same price) who chose to go direct to the company for it.
Yes it’s available in respect of every tenant/guarantor WHO PASSES REFERENCING. And the tenants/guarantors WHO PASS REFERENCING are the very same ones least likely to generate a claim.
When encouraging your clients to use this commission-earning product do you, for example, clearly illustrate the claim rate? Of course not. Because if you did, then either the claim rate would be high, which would bring the referencing process into question, or else the claim rate is low because for the most part it’s a waste of time.
RGI is a well known and fairly tired old game that reputable letting agents are well aware of but don’t play other than to make their clients aware of it and its negative as well as positive aspects.
And the fact is that it creates a cost centre which the user will be unlikely to ever recover via claims.
As to the referencing itself, we-e-ell…
…t’internet’s full of opinions. They can’t all be suppressed, can they?
Hey,
No, so our price is £89 for 12 months. It would be £140 for the comparable policy if one went straight to the supplier 
.
Yep, this is how referencing works! People who pass are less likely to not pay the rent.
.
This assumes the only thing people are buying when they take out insurance is:
(probability of payout)*(payout value)
.
But actually most people know that they are buying:
(probability of payout)*(payout value) + peace of mind + ability to forecast future rental income with certainty
Which is clearly worth a lot more, and is the reason that there’s been a thriving insurance business for centuries!
We’re happy to let readers check out that link and make their own judgments on it.
What has not been mentioned here is the actual cost to novice landlords using this rent guarantee rubbish. The main cost I believe is the lost rental income while the RGI company forages through the accounts and personal details of the lessee/guarantor, which can take upwards of two weeks. The other cost alluded to above is the turning down of quality tenants who would pay their rent but for some spurious reason do not pass the credit checks (e.g., Brits who have returned from abroad who have plenty of money but cant show three months of PAYE having not worked in the UK for some time). I agree with Abdul any landlord who knows his business will use cursory checks and his own judgement and be just fine.
Abdul It all comes down to OUR judgement of potential tenants and that is not easy.