Tenants Registration on the Portal

OpenRent Chat
1

Hi,

I have been getting a lot of inquiries about my flat from tenants but most of them I find that they are agents. To stop this from happening and getting complaints from landlords, can’t Openrent ask the tenants when they registered to provide either their passport or driving licence as a form of ID so that it will reduce the number of agent trying to be tenants. Also it would be nice for the system to provide their name so you know how to address them. Even if the agent try to register with a different mobile or email address the ynderlying proof ID will prevent them to re-registered if someone complained about them being an agent. This functionality will improve the service and makes alot of landlord happier!

I look forward to this functionality to be added ASAP.

Thanks,
Dennis

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Hi Dennis, I appreciate it is frustrating to receive messages from agents (presumably trying to sell you things?) via OpenRent. We don’t want them on the site and we have systems in place to stop them. Obviously making those systems public would make them much easier to defeat, so I won’t be sharing info about them here.

I’m afraid not. There are several reasons for this. The biggest ones are:

  • it is quite easy to show a picture of a fake ID or to use someone else ID
  • it would put genuine tenants off using OpenRent, meaning landlords would receive fewer genuine enquiries

Although I would not recommend it, there’s nothing stopping you from asking to be sent ID in your auto-reply message when enquiries are made about your property.

One idea which is interesting is giving some kind of verified status to tenants who have been in OpenRent tenancies before and who we therefore know are real tenants. As we continue to grow, we may one day have the volume of users needed to explore those kinds of solutions.

For now, we will continue to remove agents from the site when we find them.

The most helpful thing users can do is to use the ‘report’ button when these unwanted enquiries are sent to you.

Thanks for sharing your product ideas!
Sam

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I get that an amazing amount of time & its a huge issue indeed & most agents especially the rent for rent type have deceived me & outright lied even until thereafter the viewing.

I find that a couple of questions pre-viewing prevents this situation most of the time such as;

  1. Take full name, address & number.
  2. Ask them to confirm if they are an agent or not

I find this does massively help but these agents are desperate & persistent but they dont admit so

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