Rent payments should be included when calculating credit scores to support tenants wanting to buy a home of their own.
The Residential Landlords Association is writing to the Government, calling on it to work with the industry to include rent payment history as a standard feature when calculating credit stores.
RLA chairman Alan Ward said: “With many tenants wanting to buy a house of their own, it is absurd rent payment is not routinely included when undertaking credit checks for mortgage applications.
“Moving to such a scheme would help not just tenants, but also landlords by giving them a clearer sense of whether a prospective tenant has historically paid their rent in full and on time.”
There is a scheme called the Rental Exchange, available from Experian via the Credit Ladder platform. The Rental Exchange incorporates a tenant’s payment history into their credit file.
Yesterday Sheraz Dar, CEO of Credit Ladder, said he agreed with the RLA’s campaign.
He said: “CreditLadder was set up to enable tenants to ensure their regular rent payments were added to their credit score, and we make it clear that if they fail to pay their rent this will be passed on to Experian as well. We’ve already processed rents in excess of £7.5m.”
We would love to offer the Rent Exchange service to tenants. I agree that rental payments should be taken into account on the tenants credit file. This will assist the tenants with a future home purchase and also hold them more accountable with rental payments. However, as we will no longer be able to charge fees to tenants soon I doubt that we would have the resources or the incentive to provide and administer such a scheme.
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For any agents, rent collection and property management companies interested in reporting to The Rental Exchange please contact me on help@creditladder.co.uk. It’s not as time-consuming as you would think.
Asa Bentley
CreditLadder
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As far as I am aware, the Rent Exchange is free to use
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We know this, however It is not free for our staff to administrate!!!
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http://www.laterent.co.uk – Free simple to use Solution in Partnership with Equifax.
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Being cynical here, but it looks like the PR guys from Credit Ladder have had an input into this article.
Why no mention of Late Rent?
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