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It’s very rude, but it can be hard to stay on stop of. I had 80 people messaging me for a property recently.
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Often landlords are bombarded. Have you fully answered any screening questions ? I ignore the ones that don’t.
I just rented a place and had 87 requests. If you don’t answer the initial screening questions fully, plus any additional screening questions that you receive, then you won’t get any replies. If you just say something like “call me on 07777 7777777” you definitely won’t get anywhere, or if your answer to the montly income question is £70,0000 (for a £1,500/month flat) or £40 or zero (I had all these answers from tenants) then you won’t get a reply either.
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Just had similar thing with 80 enquiries. Ones that say “please please let me have it”, or don’t answer all of my 22 questions, or who conveniently skip questions, or who lack basic communication skills have zero chance.
I do tend now to send them a generic brush off message though as they will often ring openrent saying they haven’t had a reply, so I now avoid OR tediously lecturing me.
I hear you, and used to wonder the same…and get frustrated from not understanding how it all works.
If you add in “Dear (name of landlord)”, say a bit about what you do, your financial capability to pay the rent, that may help.
There’s a section in OR which gives advice to tenants on what to include in initial messages.
Also, at the initial stage, it’s just an enquiry. Yes, the property is being advertised. But you still have to show the landlord that you’re the person they would want as your tenant (reliable bill payments, clear communications etc).
With so many tenants applying (I went to a last minute viewing, and even then there were a dozen people queuing along the corridor to view the flat) and so few properties at the moment, as landlords have said, sometimes they just get overwhelmed with messages, nothing personal.
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One other thing is that to me, the voice message is far less important than the screening questions, some people seem to think that if they leave a voice message then there is no need to do the screening questions. The people I finally rented to were the people who provided the most complete answers to the screening questions, it showed me that we could have a rational conversation and built trust from day 1.
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I think there’s an inherent problem. IE tenant sees advert on RightMove, they call up and leave voicemail, believing that this is enough. They are unaware of the screening questions.
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@Mark10 I think you are correct. I had a lot of people just leaving voicemails. Many of them sounded fine. but they were immediately discounted because they didn’t answer the screening questions. I think better to not offer voicemail as what is the point of it anyway, I am not interested in hearing a random voice message that sometimes stray off into all kinds of unrelated topics, I just want the answers to the questions I want.
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@Mark10 I do get very irritated by OpenRent’s lecturing. Prospective tenants who can’t be bothered to do anything more than leave 3 second voicemail then expect me to chase them down don’t deserve a reply but OpenRent seem to think so.
I don’t appreciate the telling off and have told them so
In general landlords will feel motivated to respond to messages that suggest a promising tenant, i.e. messages which are straightforward and businesslike, and suggest some understanding of the rental process.
I’ll be honest, when advertising on OpenRent, I’ve not responded to most voice messages, for the simple reason they are generally incoherent.
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@Daz So perhaps OR should consider dropping the voice message function, it seems like it actually detracts and distracts from the process. Not sure why it was ever put there in the first place.
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For me about one in ten are ok. Most are just garbled nonsense, literally! I suppose it acts as a good screening tool if you think about it.
The one good one will rarely get a call back as it’s more hassle, I will deal with the ones who answer the screening questions.
It’s unfortunate, unfair even, that those leaving voice are more likely to be excluded.
We do give everyone who leaves a voice message the option to add additional information / messages to the landlord, so I guess the question here is more specific to voice messages where the tenant doesn’t do this. Knowing whether a tenant will add supplementary information or not at the point of making their enquiry is obviously not easy, but I just want to point out that many “voice message” enquiries will look like normal enquiries following the tenant supplying further details, and I suspect most landlords wouldn’t want to lose out on those enquiries! So it’s perhaps not quite as trivial as made out here, unfortunately.
We’ll certainly have a think about how we can do some quality control on this enquiry type. If you want to send any problematic examples to us it will certainly help us remove the unhelpful enquiries whilst ensuring genuine enquiries make it through to landlords.
These conversations / discussions are always challenging when the tenant demand is high vs. tenant demand dropping off. And certainly over the last 24 months, it’s been high! When we’ve gone through quieter periods in the past, we’d often get feedback of ensuring we don’t “get in the way” of enquiries, and so we do need to find a delicate balance here of ensuring tenants can enquire easily, whilst ensuring they are of sufficient quality / genuine.
Thanks for the feedback though, and again, any specific examples are often useful for us to tweak things on our end - so do email these over if possible.
I think there are 2 problems, (i) that the voice message is not a response to a list of questions, just a message containing unsolicited information and in many cases the tenant does not know what to say either so they just leave their phone number thinking I am going to call them back, and (2) is that the voice message adds a third layer to the tenant’s enquiry. The screeening questions from OR is layer 2 and the more detailed questions from the landlord is layer 3. If I was a tenant I would probably also give up by layer 2, but unfortunately for me in any case what I am most interested in is the layer 3 replies.
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I have have always set a screening questionnaire. If it’s not fully answered I reject the applicant and state that as the reason.
Voicemails are a total waste of time they are always incoherent ramblings the content of which is usually there phone number asking me to ring them to arrange a viewing. This is never going to happen. If I could switch voicemails off I would.
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