Rentguard Referencing Reviews 

Landlords and tenants beware!

Rentguard is unprofessional, not thorough (often missing critical information that negatively affects the tenancy status of a renter), requires constant following up and inquiry, and ultimately is an unreliable operation.

The process is completely unclear and asks for very personal information that they should not have access to. The fact this information needs to be given to have access to renting opportunities is a damning indictment of this country.

Failed even though my salary was over 5 times my rent price. Lost the house.

If Covid did companies.
INCOMPETENCE

This is my experience as a tenant.
They do a super intrusive check, requesting a lot of information that I'm not sure they even use and you cannot complete the check until you have provided all of it.
In the process they requested information about my passport and the country where I am from was not in the list!
Once I completed all the required fields, in about 5 different sections, they still requested extra information in a separate email that brings me back to the website I just closed. Probably they realized the previous 5 sections were useless and they forgot to ask for the important information.
During the process I called them since I was frustrated with multiple points in the form and I got an automated message saying I was calling outside office hours. The only problem is that the message did not mention what the office hours are for them!
Once the final results came in, to my surprised I got a risk score "moderate" while in the same report they state I can afford twice the price the rent I am applying for, have 0 debts and have always paid all my duties before the deadlines.
In the same report they claimed I did not provide right to rent documents (which I did) so I had to email them and request the result to be corrected.
When the right to rent was updated the risk score stayed the same and I have had enough of this company to even ask for an explanation.
I definitely do not recommend this company. At this point I am concern about my personal data being handled by them. I hope OpenRent finds a better company to partner with.

Cowboy of a company. Reported to the FCA and bodies relevant too this company.
inaccurate checks as claim they do a honest check, Then come back with not enough information provided. When provided the information requested the computer says no company cant use common sense and logic.
Failing a check when the rent charge would only be 15 percent of my Monthly salary.
From the looks of it I'm not alone and will be taking it further.
Call themselves a company if you call ripping people off then maybe so.
Not the last you have heard of me and will make sure action is taken

Incredibly intrusive, unprofessional and incompetent. After failing to receive the information they needed from one of my references, they harassed him, calling him 5 times. On top of this they emailed my entire company's management without my permission. Regardless of the property, I would turn down any landlord asking me to use this service again.

This was on top of a series of intrusive requests to access my online banking and savings accounts. One star is generous.

Intrusive, obstructive and not helpful. Made us go round in circles and nearly cost us a property we really wanted to rent. Asking for personal things such as access to our banking apps and phoning guarantors bosses and asking inappropriate questions.

Literally the worst service I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with. I would give them 0 stars if I could. No communication over email and when I called them up to get to the bottom of my issues I was waiting over half an hour to be put through. Once I was finally in contact with a representative they were not only short and rude to me over the phone, they lied to me, saying that they had not received my documents and had replied to all of my messages (They definitely had not replied). They then made mistake after mistake with mine and my partners referencing forms, resulting in me having to call them during work hours as this was the only way I could get them to reply and coming up with bogus excuses as to why the mistakes had been made, placing the blame on myself and my partner. Would 100% never recommend these imbeciles to anyone, they don't know what they are doing, very very unsatisfied.

Totally agree with Stephen Proctor below, they are clueless. A raft of intrusive questions, demands for personal information they don't need. I informed them I wasn't going to participate in their process any longer informing them that under Art. 17 of the GDPR I wanted my information removing, and they proceeded to sent an interim report (I was up as Guarantor) to the Landlord with a "declined" and a poor credit rating (I have a credit rating of excellent).
Appalling Company - refuse to deal with them

We are retired. We have no jobs, but we do have enough financial assets to cover the rent many times over. The referencing app cannot handle this and advised we would need a guarantor. We are in the position to be a guarantor, rather than need one. We have 9 years of perfect tenant references. An actual estate agent can deal with this no problem, by checking proof of assets and bank accounts.

User interface/emails unclear and difficult to negotiate. Unfriendly on the phone. Made what should be a fairly straight forward process into a very stressful and frustrating couple of weeks.

Hard to avoid as a renter as you have to use them through OpenRent. But definitely not worth your money if you are a landlord.

Terrible experience. The point in a referencing company is to provide an accurate portrayal of the person being referenced. I went into the process dubious due to other reviews on here - but I had to use this company because it’s what openrent use.

I knew that there would need to be plenty of evidence submitted and so I endeavoured to email and try to contact the company asking them what they needed and sending them what I could.

The initial report they gave me was damning and completely inaccurate. The income they stated was incorrect, they had not verified my address despite evidence and the credit score was completely different to the credit score I have elsewhere. After waiting a long time to speak to someone I did actually get through to a pleasant advisor who very quickly changed the address verification stating “oh, I don’t know why the assessor has done that”. Unfortunately the rest of the report has likely affected my chances of getting the property I wanted.

This company’s business is to provide an accurate portrayal of someone. The report is their product and their product is sloppy and faulty. It’s akin to purchasing an iPhone and finding that some iPhones don’t make calls.

To improve they need to be more thorough, more responsive to those they are investigating, and question when details or scores seem unrepresentative of the candidate they have in front of them.

I give them english drive licensing and council tax with my address and they told me we cant found your address. I never met the same company.

Efficient and good customer care, advised for any landlord.

An insane company.
The Little Britain sketch of "computer says no" must have come from speaking to these people.
Their forms don't ask for all the information they need to accept a reference so they will send declined forms without informing why. When you speak to them on the phone they will say they cleared the matter up only to send another declined email. Very little sign of intelligence and let down by a terrible process from start to finish.

Had to complete a very intrusive form and provide third party access to my bank account only to find out that the final report stated a much lower salary (about 20%) than my real one and my risk score came through as moderate (I never missed a single payment in my life). I sent an email asking to rectify this and they got back to me asking for my company' HR email when I did already provide one in the form (as well as the phone number). So not only they use a completely inaccurate model to estimate the salary but they also like to duplicate people's effort by asking the same questions twice. Awful experience.

After reading other people's reviews I was really anxious about going through the referencing process with rentguard however I have to say that my experience was really good. It took a week for the reference to be completed but this was only because they were waiting to hear back from my landlord. I have knocked off 1 star because no one was answering the phone on the number provided from rentguard to my landlord which is why this took so long, however when I gave my landlord an alternative number the reference was completed within a matter of minutes. Using the portal on the open rent website I could see how my application was progressing and what parts they were still waiting for. I am perfectly happy with the service offered by rentguard especially considering this was during a global pandemic!

Absolute joke of a company, asking for more information than is needed for a simple rental reference. Asked for employers reference but never followed up on any of the information given. They want access to your bank accounts to see proof of income, when a simple payslip can do this? Have gone round in circles to get a guarantor authorised but for some strange reason they ask for pieces of evidence individually so takes days to get anywhere. Has Been a week now and have got no further than when we applied through openrent. Shambles of a company and cant wait to see the back of them when this is over. How they are still operating a ‘business’ ill never know, landlords and tenants avoid at all costs.

I provided all the information required after being directed from the Openrent website and it came back not even a couple of hours later as failed, which is completely ludicrous because:

I have never once owed any money to anyone, EVER.
I have never ever paid late to anyone.
I make well above the amount of rent I want to pay in an industry where I can find a job in a couple of weeks max should I ever lose the one I have.
Even if that were to fail I have plenty of money in my bank account to cover my rent for well over the lease period.

The company is extremely unprofessional, they didn't contact any of the references I provided or contacted me for any needed clarification, they just straight away sent the failed report to the landlord, which made me look really bad, for no reason whatsoever.

I have emailed them, will speak to them tomorrow hopefully, but even if they solve this issue straight away, I am still fuming by the message this sends and how badly handled this is. You just do not toy around with people's livehood like this, especially when you can end up on the street, even while making really good money, which is ridiculous.

And judging by the amount of negative reviews here, I am even angrier that they are doing it so often and Openrent just lets them get away with it. Shame on you Openrent!