Reducing the risk of a rogue tenant

Guest Blog from Lorna Rose of TenantID

For some reason mortgage defaults increased during the first 3 months of this year.

I’m not an economist, but I suspect the current financial climate may have had something to do with it.

Once you have loaded your medium sized family car half full of unleaded, stuffed cash into the outstretched hands of the gas, electricity and phone companies and watched your bank balance plummet after the weekly shop there is precious little money left for such fripperies as a mortgage.

If this situation continues, this is clearly going to pose a problem for landlords as people who continually default on their mortgage have their homes repossessed. When this happens they need to find another home and as they won’t get another mortgage in a hurry having defaulted on the last one, it is a renting they will go.

The issue is, if they can’t pay their mortgage, how are they going to pay their rent?

With this potential issue looming, it is all the more important for Landlords to be as sure as they can the person they are renting to will be able to meet their payments.

Although it may not be possible to spot potentially risky tenants who are new to the market, moves are underway to identify those who have already abused the system and in some cases have been abusing it for years.

Tenant ID is working to establish a nationwide database of tenants and their letting histories. The aim is that millions of names will eventually be held on a single, nationwide database enabling landlords, letting agents and local authorities to find out at the touch of a button if someone has a history of default, damage, arrears or breach of tenancy agreements.

Everyone needs somewhere to live and this system is not about blacklisting someone who was late a couple of times due to financial hardship.  TenantID is about weeding out the genuine rogue tenants who have cost their landlords thousands of pounds in unpaid rent or damage.

As belts tighten, it is inevitable some ordinary, decent people may through no fault of their own find it hard to pay their rent. The problem is landlords won’t know who these people are until the payments begin to dry up.

That is why it is all the more important to take proven problem tenants out of the equation from the outset.  Registeration with TenantID is FREE, the first step is to click the logo below.

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