Everyone knows how important it is to carry out reference checks on tenants before they move in. So it’s astonishing to find that some landlords still don’t carry out the most basic background checks on a tenant they may have met only once before.

At I Am the Agent, the UK’s largest online estate agency, we offer landlords a four-point credit referencing check. This is a comprehensive referencing service which covers:

• Credit score and history
• Affordability
• Income reference (written and verbal)
• Previous landlord reference (written and verbal)

So landlords can immediately establish from the report that the tenant can actually afford the rent with plenty of cash left over each month for other bills and living expenses. They will also be able to see straight away that the tenant does indeed work where they say they do and that their previous landlords really loved them.

And don’t forget, if the affordability is a bit of an issue, the landlord can always ask for a guarantor as cover in case the tenant can’t pay, perhaps because of loss of job. Obviously, we would recommend that the guarantor is checked out too!

This should go some way to giving peace of mind that the tenant won’t skip the rent and so avoid the heartache, time, cost and trouble of having to evict a non-paying tenant.

The beauty of the referencing service is that it can all be done online; once the landlord and tenant have agreed the rent and term of the tenancy, just pass the details over to us and we will get this all done online. Landlords can choose whether they ask the tenants to pay for the referencing too.