Referencing before viewings – everyone’s a winner!

Referencing before viewings – everyone’s a winner!

11:13 AM, 20th March 2015, About 9 years ago 21

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I recently wrote about a scenario where I had 60 viewing requests and 19 viewings in one dayReferencing before viewings - everyone's a winner

Great you may think, and yes it was 🙂 Demand was high and two people even ended up offering me £75 pcm over the asking price.

HOWEVER, the first couple failed referencing due to having three months rent arrears and the second couple failed due to an undisclosed CCJ. This cost me time and has lead to an unwelcome delay and void period.

Thankfully the third person referenced up and is now proceeding at £25 over asking price – PHEW!

It got me thinking though, and I have suggested this to the Directors at LettingSupermarket.com

Where demand is so high, why not offer the interested parties an option to get ahead of the game by charging them a small fee for refencing in advance of viewing the property? Clearly this will only work when demand is very high because some prospective tenants will not go for it. That doesn’t have to exclude them from viewing though.

My other thought is that tenants could be given a copy of their reference. This could come in very handy for them when they go to meet other landlords and agents too. If the reference doesn’t make for good reading at least they will know.

For me, as a landlord, it potentially speeds up the entire process.

For the agent it saves wasting time and earns them extra money.

From what I can see, everyone’s a winner.

What are your thoughts?

Regards

Mark Alexander – founder of Property118.com and non-Exec Director (Consultant) to LettingSupermarket.com

 


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Comments

Iqbal Ahmed

20:11 PM, 10th March 2016, About 8 years ago

In this current era we are not really making the most of the tech that we have, we are constantly referencing tenants all the time even if that tenant had gone through referencing several times with different landlords.

Wouldn't it be better to have a trusted network of landlords and tenants, sort of like eBay where you can see their feedback.

https://www.rentoo.co.uk/

This site is aiming to achieve this grand task by providing a free referencing service so it can help build that network and community. I think that is what we should be hoping to move towards in the future.

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