I’ve noticed in my home city of Cardiff that landlords / letting agents seem to be getting particularly a lot of stick at the moment.
C4’s Joe Lycett’s Got your Back did a piece on one of the agents, and students seem to have responded. They’re ‘arming’ themselves left right and centre. I’ve seen a few student groups setting up platforms that enable students to review their properties, letting agents, and landlords.
The landlord in me says, it would be great to be able to review letting agents themselves and see reviews on others, before opting on who would manage my property, and being able to review tenants back. But is this a good idea?
I’d be really keen to hear others thoughts on this.
If your properties are up together, well maintained why worry.
There are some dodgy landlords that need rooting out to improve the landlord name.
If you are owed money due the lock-down, beware giving way on debt, it will be all over the network before you know it and others will try the same tact. You also have the backers / guarantors to claim on
I would imagine the ICO under GDPR rules would have something to say about this. i doubt, as a landlord, I would be allowed to disclose information about my tenant, including information about their debts and suitability as a tenant. One would hope, under the same GDPR rules, a landlord would have the same rights , however, given current direction of travel to push landlords under the proverbial bus I doubt we’d have the same protections.
AS a minimum the landlord should have the right of reply, but I would be concerned this would go the way of sites like Trip Advisor where people effectively hold the merchant to ransom by seeking advantage under threat of a bad review. In all likelihood, such websites would attract a disproportionate number of complainers. If that was not the case, unlike sites such as Trip advisor where the odd bad review is read in conjunction with good ones, there would not be the same volume for smaller landlords to provide a balanced perspective.
It would also disadvantage small operators in that their legal pathway to deal with misinformation/lies perpetrated by disgruntled tenants would be limited. Large portfolio investors and the rent to build commercial giants would just chuck their legal weight around and force a retraction, potentially skewing the reviews to only include the more positive ones. This is already the experience with smaller operators on Trip Advisor, where they have fewer avenues for redress.
This is defiantly one of those situations where the consequences are unknown, but given legal protection largely favours the tenant, landlords will more than likely come off worse, once again!!
Not sure if you are referring to my blog, the network I was referring to was the financial network, who when you are being referenced do share info - that’s how credit referencing works and your credit rating score is created
Brian7, landlords do not get any information of people that are credit checked. Not even company they work at or salary. It’s a numeric score based on a risk value.