Why Can’t I Sort Properties by Newest to Oldest?

You’re searching on OpenRent for a new home. You want the freshest places to rent as soon as they come onto the market. You click on the search options to sort properties by ‘newest to oldest’ and — wait. The option isn’t there?

Is this a glitch in the site? Have OpenRent failed to build such basic functionality? No. This is deliberate, friends. Let me tell you all about OpenRent’s relationship with time-ordered property-sorting. 

Every Property You See on OpenRent Is Available

On portal websites like Rightmove and Zoopla, you can sort adverts from new to old. In fact, that’s the default. Why? 

The portals list properties that are advertised by letting agents. That means the portals aren’t in direct contact with landlords or tenants. They just facilitate messaging between the agents who upload the ads and the tenants who enquire about them

An agent could have signed a tenancy agreement with a tenant a few days ago, but not got around to taking the advert off Rightmove yet. In fact this is common. In fact, this is often deliberate. They deliberately keep nice properties up for longer so that tenants will call them up, and then they say “that one’s gone, but we have another one…”. 

This has probably happened to you. Hey, this is probably the reason you want to sort from new to old in the first place, right? 

So back to the main question. Why can’t you sort from new to old on OpenRent? 

Well — OpenRent is not a portal. We’re a letting agent that communicates directly with our tenants and landlords, so we know exactly when our properties are no longer available. As soon as a let has been agreed, we take that property off the site straight away.

That means all the properties live on OpenRent.co.uk are available to rent. You won’t be clicking on a nice property from a week ago just for a letting agent to say “sorry” and then add your contact details to their annoying mailing list. On OpenRent, that nice property will still be genuinely on the market.

Because all the live properties are available, it’s much less relevant how old they are. You know they can still be enquired about in good faith.

But I still want to see the new ones first!

Yes we totally get this. I am also like this. The best way to see the new properties first on OpenRent is to set up an email alert. 

Every day, we’ll send you one email with all the new properties that match your search criteria. That saves you a lot of time trawling the site for new properties and means you will be one of the first people to see that the property is available. 

Here’s how to set up an email alert on OpenRent.

On top of the search alert giving you the inside scoop, we also show how many enquiries each property has received so far on every advert. This lets you can see exactly how many tenants have been in touch before you. 

Our properties don’t stick around long anyway

Finally, keep in mind that OpenRent properties let very quickly. 

With our safe and efficient online tenancy creation features, the average OpenRent property is only on the site for seven days before it is let. That means the majority of the properties you see on the site are less than seven days old. 

Once you know that, it seems much less important to see which properties are brand new and which are old — because old for OpenRent probably means online for just nine days!

So now you know. All OpenRent properties are available. We don’t leave bait properties out to snag your details. And most of our properties are gone within a week anyway. 

So sorting new to old isn’t such a big deal after all. 

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