Rentguard Referencing Avis 

If you have been living with someone for over a year who has some CCJ, no matter how good your credit report is (even 999 out of 999 on Experian) they will mark you down as high risk with no other information, just because this is the way they do things I've been told! They also could not find the details of my partner CCJ's so had to call him to ask, when anyone with an Experian or similar account can access everything.
They never contacted our employers and calculated our annual gross salary using last employer payments on our bank statements, needless to say when you had a Christmas bonus, you wish you had the annual salary they show on the report!
They contacted our previous landlord but still managed to report the dates wrong.
Landlords, please do not waste your money with them, they report incorrect information and have zero care for what they do.
This company should not be able to continue trading, I am so surprised with so many other people having such a bad experience that they have not been closed already!

Worst experience ever! These people can’t read documents, can’t compile
Information! How is it possible for them to be helping anyone make decisions about other people?!

this company is the WORST ever met in 11 years living in uk .racist , incompetent , slow
you need ages to have an anwer and every day a new person is following your file
they do not look at people as human being
for them people are just numbers and play with their lives
if you rent you can get in trouble to find a tenant
if you are tenant you can get in trouble to find a landlord thank to their incompetent score based on LIES !!!
yea a company of incompetent liars !
I am surprise OPENRENT use that company .
totally avoid
and they should be reported for racism , an unfair behaviour towards honest people who pay taxes and want to find a flat to rent !
they gave me a score based on lies
fortunately the landlord believes me but their score ruin people
disgusting
that company should be shut down today

An incompetent referencing agent that fails both the landlord and tenant. Make numerous critical mistakes with inputting tenant information, resulting in the loss of multiple potential tenants that could have passed the reference check. Unwilling to refund referencing fee despite mistakes made in referencing. Using this agent will most probably cause you to waste 3 to 4 months before you can finally rent out your property.

Subtly racist company that has prejudice against people of colors. Will disregard completely verifiable payslips and bank statements based on your race. Incredibly rude in emails and discloses your personal information without prior written consent. Anyone who has encountered similar discriminations with these disgusting people should also file a report with Acas or equality-advisory-support-service. Remember you are protected under the 2010 Equality act.

Avoid them at all cost! - They are a bunch of incompetent people who has mixed up people with their information here & there and too rude when you call them and tell them to fix it. I have used them through openrent but Openrent should really consider them dropping as their partners.

This company is an absolute joke - please do avoid at all cost.

First they clearly do not care about the confidentiality of your information. I have been asked to forward confidential document like bank statements, contract of employment or even my full passport... by a simple email. This is unsecure and totally not acceptable for a company, which regularly have to ask for these type of info in their activity, to not have a secured deposit folder in place. Emails are unsecure and not encrypted. Clearly a massive GDPR infringment.

Secondly I'd like to highlight their inneficency which cost me almost to not pass a ref for an appartment. As a tenant, they made a mistake in my previous adress of residency and couldnt find me at that adress... However instead of asking me more questions about why they couldnt find it, they simply conluded that I was not living there and therefore my credit score went down by 100 points, putting me as a "high risk profile". If I didnt catch that on the report on time so that they could amend it, the landlord would have naturally declined my application.

Landlords, avoid this company.

This company is an absolute crap. We applied for a house to rent and were forwarded to them. They sent us atleast 10 differed kinds of forms to check our passport, bank account, residence confirmation and employment confirmation and more. maybe to make a good impact on us. But they mixed up my details with my husband's details and sent it for credit check. Not only our application was refused/declined but it was treated as fraud. I rang the company multiple times and requested them to rectify their mistake that they realise they should do but it looks like a bunch of untrained staff is there dealing with people's most private and confidential data. we've lost the house we wanted to rent. Very well done..they should receive the worst referencing company award..😡😡
I will lodge a complaint on their website too.

I’m writing this before I’ve even had a decision on my referencing so I can’t be accused of being bitter for not passing as if I do or don’t remains to be seen.

Never in my life have I dealt with customer service like this, you can call and call repeatedly, they don’t pick up and the phone cuts off. Once you eventually get through you get some disinterested voice that’s as much help as a chocolate fireguard. The online process is a nightmare, you can only add one bank, some people do use multiple banks, saving accounts ect..tough apparently they’ll mail me and ask for statements, or so they say and half the time you fill in a box and it’s still blank despite typing. It’s infuriating and quite frankly crap.

As a 'financial services' company you'd expect these people to understand how a self-assessment calculation works. Not so. I was attempting to become a guarantor again, for my daughter, who is about to embark on her MA in London. I have an excellent credit score and a healthy income, having successfully run my own business for over 6 years. Despite a glowing and detailed reference from my accountant, Rentguard put my affordabilty score way below the required figure for my daughter.

Turns out they don't know how to read the figures on a self-assessment form, and even after several explanations, they couldn't get past the fact they need to put a single figure in a box (I assume they're using some kind of calculation) which applies a standard rate of income tax against that figure.

If you're a Director of limited company you will know the tax rates are different, which is why my accountant sent them detailed paperwork.

I've now raised a complaint with the parent company, but I'm not hopeful it will go anywhere, so next steps will be the financial ombudsman. I suggest others who have had bad dealings with this company do the same.

I was quite worried due to all the negative reviews, so I made sure to call them during the referencing process to chase things up. They always picked up the phone and responded promptly. I also requested they actually contact our employers to verify income rather than going purely off the Open Banking analysis. They were happy to do this, and I would advise anyone getting checked by them to request the same. We had no major issues and passed the referencing process within 2 working days.

I am never one to write reviews but my experience with RentGuard has compelled me to do so. This referencing company is utterly shambolic in the way they conduct themselves.

Their website looks and acts as if it was built in the early 2000s. When you are asked to upload documents such as ID it doesn't bother to tell you what file type is preferred. After much trial and error I figured out it only accepts .pngs, not PDFs or Word Docs.

In the even you cannot upload a document you'll get a hastily written email asking for them to be attached and sent to them. I have done this TWICE for 2 different properties and they have still failed my referencing on the basis that I didn't provide them a copy of the passport, after I had directly emailed them.

There is absolutely no way to track the progress of your referencing application via the website or to voluntarily upload documents to bolster your application.

Whenever I have rang to explain the situation and get more guidance I either get no answer or am told to refer to an email/the website.

Additionally they also do reference checks on guarantors and mine has had the exact same difficulty. Failed on the basis that the proper evidence was not provided when it was, it just had to be sent directly via email because their website is useless.

Because of all this the prospective landlord has got the impression that both myself and my guarantor have failed referencing checks because of their own incompetency.

I cannot fathom, in this day and age, how a referencing company can think it is ok to conduct its self like this. These checks can mean the difference between a roof over your head or going homeless. Sort it out RentGuard. Tenants deserve better.

Sent over every bit of documents needed twice, still not enough. Tried calling every number they have to talk to a human being and all I got was a minute of ringing and the line cutting off.

Absolutely disgusting how this company judges you on how reliable you are for a tenancy even though they themselves are one of the least reliable companies I have ever tried to deal with.

Do not ever use these people, doesn’t matter how cheap they are they will let you down over and over again, making a simple process seem like a PhD in Neurology science.

Trying to be a guarantor for daughter student flat - as have done 3 times before - always passed fine before with other companies - my equifax score is 1000 / 1000 - i earn more now than before and have less credit now than before - they said no ? - was shocked - never been turned down for credit in over 30 years - told them to think again - passed second time ? - cannot talk to anyone on phone but did answer emails quickly

Approached by this company to confirm a member of staffs employment. Asked to send personal and identifiable information via unsecure email or fax. Surely this is against GDPR or other legislation. In this day and age if someone is paying for a service there should be a secure and safe online method for sharing and confirming information.

Rentguard made several glaring errors in their report in my case, including leaving many fields (e.g. job title/employer) blank, mistaking my employment status, and not contacting an employer for income verification before releasing the report. When they did contact my employer, they waited only two hours before deciding they had 'not received verification' despite my employer responding to their queries just hours later on the same day.

Their forms are impossible to fill out if you have two jobs, especially part-time work and/or if the roles have separate employment statuses. They did not take into account financial savings without calling them separately. My partner's international form was also a complete joke, and required a week of back-and-forth emails to clarify details that could've easily been stated in the application were it not such a ridiculous template.

There is also no consideration in their policy framework given to graduates who have no employed or self-employed tax history. The explanations provided by the company were insufficient, nonsensical, and dismissive. I was approved in an instant by my landlord once he could validate my income and savings himself, but was rejected by this company through a combination of incompetence, laziness, terrible forms and bizarre policies.

Rent Guard have dealt with various tenancy references for our properties over the past few years. They have always provided a quick and professional service, being easy to contact when questions arise. As a landlord I would recommend them.

despite all the negative views, I operate a large portfolio as a landlord and have found rent guard efficient, hassle free and generally fair.

as a tenant you are to recognise how little we are paying for the service, yes, there will be mistakes, yes finding someone that can help may be slow, but in the 95% of applications that pass through without issue, the service they offer is fabulous.

Unfortunately in a market where price is everything, service suffers. Rentguard tread this tightrope between low price and good service perfectly.

landlords know that reports aren't perfect, as a potential tenant I would strongly advise you to contact the landlord directly if there is a problem and talk it through. it works, we usually listen.

After 5 days of saying they had contacted the referee, it turned out that they had sent emails to the wrong person, never followed up on the phone and then were not available to take calls from the referee. They lost me a tenant and the rent and lost a potential tenant his tenancy