Hi!
I have two prospective tenants, a couple who are in the referencing stage. One of them has passed the check and the other, the lead tenant, has failed. The reason stated in the reference report is
"Our partners Equifax were unable to locate the applicant in the credit record using the
details they provided."
Not knowing the reason I requested Openrent to allow him to submit the address again and it promptly failed again. He then contaced Equifax and was able to locate his record. I too contacted them and they were able to confirm the address and also that he lived at that address !
Equifax said that there could be a problem with the format of the address submitted by Openrent to query their database. They said that if there are commas in the address submitted, but not in the address maintained in their database a match may not be found! I checked Openrent reference report and indeed there are many commas whereas in Equifax’s database there aren’t any in the tenant’s current address.
Now, there is no way the tenant can specify his address in Openrent without commas as it is automatically derived after he provides the postcode and then selects his flat number.
I have tried to explain this to the Openrent customer service , (which apparently is a 3rd party which simply redirects the queries to the appropriate team ) and all I get is a standard email from the referencing team , the latest being :
"This means that our partners, Equifax, were unable to locate the applicant in the credit record using the details they provided.
There can be legitimate reasons for this, such as when a person is new to the UK or has not built a credit footprint for other reasons such as living at home.
In this situation, we would advise that the applicant review the information they provided to us, including their name and address history. If they would expect a record to be found then we would advise reaching out to Equifax directly."
Dear Openrent : We have contacted Equifax and found the tenant’s record, I have tried to explain to you that it is likely an issue with the address you are submitting to Equifax and need somebody to manually submit the amended address to Equifax, in the format provided via email. So far haven’t had any luck. Please look into this as a priority as we’ve lost at least 5 days trying to overcome this technical glitch.
Regards
Sameer