Landlords who use OpenRent benefit from our super-smart service. We have designed our system to make landlord life as easy as can be, automating away the stuffy admin and red tape so that you can enjoy your tenant relationship and get on with your life.
We’ve been taking on your feedback and improving since 2011. That’s 10 years! So we thought we’d do a roundup of all the ways we have used automation to help landlords succeed.
Automated Deposit Protection
How you treat your tenant’s deposit is one of the first chances you have to show them you are professional and care about following the rules. And, if you get it wrong, you could be fined up to three times the value of the deposit. That’s often well over £5,000!
OpenRent collects the deposit from your tenants and automatically creates an account with mydeposits for you if you don’t have one. We also send the tenants the legally-required information on how their money is being protected.
Pay from Anywhere (with Automatic Confirmations)
We can secure you new tenants so quickly because we let them make payments through our site. OpenRent tenants can pay a holding deposit, tenancy deposit or rent payment any time of day or night, seven days a week.
Tenants love this. Instead of deciding they want your house on Friday night and waiting until Monday for a high street office to open, they can do it all instantly from their phone.
The best part is, we automatically send them a payment confirmation email, so they are not worrying if the rent has been received on time. And of course, we update you automatically as well. So no more being kept in the dark by shady letting agents.
Building Compliance into Our System
Good landlords want to follow the rules, and OpenRent makes it so much easier to meet your legal duties. For example, if you fail to send your tenant the Government’s ‘How to Rent’ booklet at the beginning of the tenancy, then you could lose your ability to repossess the property. OpenRent automatically sends the booklet to tenants once they have signed the contract, so you can be sure you are meeting your legal requirements.
Automatic Tenant Screening and Replies
We want to get you dozens of high-quality tenant enquiries. But what happens if you get so many enquiries that you find it hard to keep track or filter out those who aren’t quite right?
To help these landlords, we have developed our automated tenant-screening system. It ensures that tenants who have enquired about your property are fully aware of the requirements you spelled out in the advert, discouraging those who have not read the advert properly from proceeding.
You can also set up auto-replies. This allows you to write a message to be sent automatically to every tenant who applies for your property. Your reply can include details of when you are able to do viewings, or ask tenants for any information you would like to know. This really helps take a lot of the admin out of managing tenant enquiries.
Smart (and Free) Renewals
When your initial contract with your tenants is up, renewing should be as simple as pressing a ‘renew tenancy’ button. So that’s what we built! No longer do you have to pay an agent £300 for printing a new contract with different dates.
If you used OpenRent to set up your tenancy, you can initiate a free renewal when your fixed term begins to near its end. You’ll be able to edit the contract, change the rent or add tenants. When you’ve finished, we’ll email the relevant documents to your tenants and set everything up properly just like a new tenancy.
Automated Rent Collection
It’s not pleasant to chase tenants for overdue rent, so we can do this for you. Our rent collection system keeps track of what tenants have paid and what is due. We’ll automatically send tenants reminders before their rent is due. And if they don’t quite pay on time, we’ll email to let them know they are in arrears.
We pass on payments automatically when we receive them. And of course, you can check your rental balance at any time on your OpenRent dashboard.
Smart Insights to Turbocharge Your Advert
We have let over 500,000 properties in our time and we use this data to help you create the best possible advert. If you have set a rent that looks like it could be outside of the market average for your kind of property, we’ll let you know. And in the unlikely scenario that you are not getting many enquiries, we’ll analyse your advert and email you some suggestions sure to boost your performance.
Free Monthly Legal Updates
The rules landlords have to follow change quite often. OpenRent landlords receive one monthly email with all the important rule changes clearly explained. This helps you stay up to date on what you need to do (and what we have already handled for you).
Start the discussion at community.openrent.co.uk