Rental Reference for soon-to-be-gone Tenants

Hi All,
Super busy time for everyone, I believe many of you are busy with handover: Tenants coming and going like a whirlwind.

We have noticed some peculiarity: It seems that the Tenants nowadays apply to multiple places.
We have more than two groups of Tenants has 4 Rental References sent to us from other Agencies!
It is industry practice that we respond immediately and this is getting too much!
I am surprised that the Tenants can be bothered completing 4 sets of Applications. Perhaps 1Form made it too easy for them?

On the other side of the coin, we have received Applications from prospective Tenants who havent even inspected the property. One of them refused to attend Inspection after we offer to them.

 

We use Tenant Options app to prevent this. Once someone has requested a reference from us and we answer, it saves it so that when others ask reference, they get the same again. Less time stuffing around with references, more time servicing our investors

 

When we were tenants we used to apply to more than one place. In our case being International students at that time made us feel behind Australians when applying for a place so we needed to be sure of finding a place before the current lease expired.

 

Is that similar to Snug.com DT?

 

Yes, I can understand applying two properties, but they have 4, and probably more to come!

 

Yes, I don't remember how many simultaneous applications we did to be honest. But I can understand it. I remember filling the applications even before the inspections just in case.

 

Yes, except good

 

Ya, I've looked at Snug and the way the questions were phrased made me wonder how good they are.....

 

It has terrible questions, terrible phrasing, and sometimes it has a bug where it shares your answer with the tenant.

 

As a tenant, applying for 2, or 4 properties seems very low. Competition for premises is quite competitive, .. I am not sure exactly what the complaint is, are you annoyed that you have to provide references more than once? Perhaps write a reference, and forward to the tenant. Then if next LL/REA needs to contact you, they can. It really seems part and parcel of renting.

 

Some things to note here:

1. there is no obligation or requirement for a Lessor/Agent to provide a rental reference for a tenant

2. the reason a reference generally is provided, is because what goes around comes around - if you don't provide references then you'll find others won't provide references for you when you ask, in this regard, it's not so much to help the tenant it's to help the Lessor/Agent make an informed decision when deciding to approve/decline a prospective tenants application. (there is no requirement in the Act for a rental reference)

3. 1Form and other streamlined ways of applying will increase the number of properties tenants apply for as competition increases, this won't change and will only increase, so Lessor/Agents simply need to adapt to accommodate this, one way is to simply make it part of your off boarding process where you provide the tenant a copy of their final ledger + a reference based of a set of standard questions (usually 10-15 that always get asked) and tell them to submit that with each of their applications and you won't be providing anything further, and this is sufficient.

4. if tenants get visibility on the types of questions asked it will have a positive benefit in that it makes them aware on how their behaviour during the tenancy impacts their future - things like paying your rent and water late, not maintaining the property adequately, will have a negative effect on a reference and hinder their ability to rent a future property; hopefully they learn from this and become better tenants which is a good thing.

 

Seems like dejavu..... Getting annoyed with one Tenant applying to 5 places and expect us to respond with the drop of a hat!
so I searched this Forum using "Tenant Reference" and found my own thread exactly a year ago!
Something never changed!

Cant say this is normal because we have 3 groups of Tenants moving-out and they only have between one to three References required.
Rant over, back to work !

 

Probably depends on the tenants experience to date.
If they have been knocked back a few times, or not even had a PM respond, they are hardly going to wait a week for a response on one property before applying for another.

I've personally never applied for more than one property at a time, but then I've never been overly desperate to secure something or lacked any confidence in my application anyway.

 

I get it but when 30 people turn up to an open home and you have a deadline of when you need to be out of your current home most tenants will hedge their bets and apply for a number of properties. vacancies in Brisbane are less than 1%. all we can do is process them as quickly as possible and sell the house as best we can to the tenants.

 

Tenants have always applied for multiple places, but I've definitely seen more of it lately. Mostly it's perfectly workable, just part of our job, but we did have one who was approved for multiple properties and wanted two weeks to make her decision... we found someone else at the next inspection.

Also, we fill out one reference sheet and send it straight back to agents who ask- someone can apply for ten houses and it takes next to no time at all for us to get everything back to them. It might not be on the paperwork the agents requested we fill out, but we've not had a complaint yet.

@Michael Mitchell I wouldn't accept a reference that a tenant provided directly, I'd always go straight to the agent, who's to say it wasn't doctored?

 

The software i use shows how many applications the tenants have pending with ours and other agencies. In the current market (almost at crisis level) its normal for tenants to apply for multiple, but can also sometimes be a red flag if a tenant is applying widely. It's all about knowing how to interpret current market conditions and the context of tenant applications

 

Thank you all for sharing.
One point to note is we have 4 groups of people moving-out between January to March (we are only a very tiny operation), all around the same area.
Out of these groups (each with multiple Tenants), only one particular Tenant has more than 5 Reference Requests.
I would think it's more of the character of the person.
We now have a quick standard reply so it's not really time-consuming. But I only sympathise the other Agents...
I suspect this is especially true for 1-form, too easy for them to apply multiple properties with least effort.

Ah well, not much we can do, just hope that we are not at the receiving end.