Good/bad experience with online tenant referencing checks? Tell us more!

AlisonResearch

Invitation to participate in research into new online tenant referencing tools

Are you a tenant who recently went through digital referencing? Do you want to share your experience with us? Did you pass or fail the check, or did you have to pay more rent in advance or get a guarantor? What impact did the decision have on you? We would love to hear from you to understand the process, what is asked of prospective tenants, what happened and how it affected you getting a home.

The University of York and the University of Bristol are undertaking work on new digital tenant referencing tools in housing. New online  tenant referencing is part of a new digital landscape of renting that automates parts of the tenant selection and tenancy and property management processes. We are interested in what is included in these new systems, how they are used and what impact they might have. The types of services we are examining include Homelet, Mojo, OpenRent, the Lettings Hub or Rightmove etc. but there are many more tools available. 

Participation involves a confidential 30 minutes or so discussion on the phone or Zoom with our researcher. All the information collected will be confidential. 

If you are interested in helping the study and have been through this online tenant referencing in the last two years, please email alexandra.ciocanel@york.ac.uk. Please tell her where you are in the country and whether your income is above or below £30,000 (so we can get an even spread of people) and we can tell you more about the project and arrange a time to talk. 

Thank you for your interest and we look forward to hearing from you!

AlisonResearch

Thanks to those that have responded but we still need some more people for the project. If you could tell us your experiences of tenant/credit checking when you've rented a property that would be really helpful to us. Many thanks.