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Letting Agent using knowledge of your income


With a crooked smile

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With a crooked smile

When you agree to rent a place through a lettings agent a credit check is supposedly done and they check your income. 

I suspect I earn more than my landlord but my rent is only £775 a month for a 3 bed barn conversion. We're beyond our 6 month term on the agreement and nothing has been mentioned about rent increases. We have a cat and a dog so moving is a pain. Is it likely they will look at my income and think mmm we can up that easily? 

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leonardratso

how do they check your income?

According to my credit files i earn x, i havent earned x for years, i now earn y.

(x=0, y=4x = 4x0)

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With a crooked smile
24 minutes ago, leonardratso said:

how do they check your income?

They ask for 3 months wage slips. 

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With a crooked smile
31 minutes ago, Herby said:

If the agent do this with knowledge gained and pass information on to the landlord isn't that a breach of some data protection rule?

Probably I know one landlord down south who was told what his tenants income was as part of thr vetting process. It was also revealed to him the lady had declared bankruptcy at some point in the past. 

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leonardratso
12 minutes ago, With a crooked smile said:

They ask for 3 months wage slips. 

ah, i didnt know that. Fair enough.

 

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Wight Flight
3 hours ago, With a crooked smile said:

When you agree to rent a place through a lettings agent a credit check is supposedly done and they check your income. 

I suspect I earn more than my landlord but my rent is only £775 a month for a 3 bed barn conversion. We're beyond our 6 month term on the agreement and nothing has been mentioned about rent increases. We have a cat and a dog so moving is a pain. Is it likely they will look at my income and think mmm we can up that easily? 

Yes.

Indeed there is actually a service a landlord can sign up to where they input their clients profession and it notifies them of their likely pay rise so that they can ensure they don't miss out on gouging any extra spare money the tenant might be getting.

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Wight Flight
11 hours ago, With a crooked smile said:

When you agree to rent a place through a lettings agent a credit check is supposedly done and they check your income. 

Don't forget they can't actually do a credit check. All they can do is check the public records for a ccj.

 

 

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With a crooked smile
6 minutes ago, Wight Flight said:

Don't forget they can't actually do a credit check

Yeah I was told there would be a credit check but one wasn't carried out. I check my credit report each month and there wasn't a hard or soft search done. 

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11 minutes ago, DTMark said:

I did read something about letting agents expecting tenants to provide "Open Banking" access to their current account so that the landlord can not only see all transactions from the past but also on an ongoing basis.

Were I to get to the point of signing up to rent somewhere and that were to be demanded, I'd be walking out.

Do I have to share my bank statements with KeySafe for new flat? | This is Money is an interesting read.

For  'The high level of acceptance of this request that we get, which is higher than most others in the industry, is in large part attributable to the fact that we are not asking for ongoing consent.' read the reality as - we have carefully constructed a request that hides every part of are intentions to use the data, and a lot of people don't understand what we are doing. 

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Wight Flight
13 minutes ago, With a crooked smile said:

Yeah I was told there would be a credit check but one wasn't carried out. I check my credit report each month and there wasn't a hard or soft search done. 

Legally they can't, as they aren't actually offering you credit.

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4 minutes ago, DTMark said:

Indeed.

"You initially thought this meant you were asked to consent to KeySafe and Salt Edge having ongoing access to your data for a year.

This would have fallen foul of open banking rules, which require a customer to provide their consent every 90 days to any company wanting access to their information. And this 90-day rule doesn't apply to a company wanting access to more than the last 90 days' worth of transactions.

In that case, consent must be given every time."

This is like Direct Debit. The payee is only supposed to set up a mandate with permission from the customer. If the mandate is cancelled, the payee must again obtain permission.

Except the bank does not concern itself with that. Nobody checks that the payer did sanction the mandate in the first place. And nobody checks that - if the payee sets it up again - that the payer agreed. The bank couldn't care less. At no point does it ask for any evidential proof. It opts out of its duty to protect their customer and their money.

In this context, that rule is meaningless since there will be no requirement for evidential proof. Once Open Banking is set up I would imagine it stays set up in perpetuity. It relies entirely upon the third party reference company removing their own access after 90 days. The banking system and the bank removes itself from any responsibility to their own customer to protect their data.

 

Nope - I use open banking in one of our software solutions - after 90 (well 88) days access stops.

Separately Starling sends me reminders that I need to reauthorise the access.

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14 minutes ago, DTMark said:

Maybe that's been tightened up? I used to use it with Quickbooks and it never once asked for reauthorisation.

The idea of sharing your finances with all financial institutions, with just one of them, seems convenient from the point of view of getting a one-pager with all your balances, but I doubt many people have so many bank accounts on the go that this is necessary and it gives the institutions far more data about you than is advisible.

I suspect you weren't using OpenBanking but the older fashioned systems where authorisation was permanent and the software was custom written for every bank.

 

That isn't allowed under Open Banking you need to re-authorise it every 90 days as the token expires at that point.

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leonardratso
3 hours ago, DTMark said:

I thought it might be quite difficult to rent this flat in Italy. We're new. We had no references from landlords in Italy.

All we had was a couple of nice reviews on Air BnB.

We could have got a reference from Savills in the UK.

However as it turned out the stringent check was the question "Are you sure you can afford it?"

I did send 3 years worth of income and transactions, plus bank statements, in a big fat PDF and Excel package but if anyone did anything more with them than print them and put them in a file I would be amazed.

This might have something to do with having learned the language, renting somewhere nice, and being somewhat charming.

and paying up front.

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leonardratso
4 minutes ago, DTMark said:

Standard deposit + 1 month rent.

The landlord is an elderly lady.

Oddly enough the previous tenants were a gay couple. They split up.

We met one of them when he came round to ask if he could have his stuff back that the other one had left shoved in the back of a wardrobe. I felt so sorry for him.

she probably only rents to gays.

high income, no kids, smartly dressed and neat etc etc etc.

Crass generalisations and sterotypes ahoy.

Probably plenty of slovenly scruffy unemployed gays around as well.

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Sorry to thread hijack but are the rules (currently) the same for mortgage renewals? I really resented sitting down with Fat Tracey at the bank last time and having her go through my bank statements and querying my purchases, the nosey cow. Surely that can't be legal?

I still remember her querying why I spent so much at Tesco one time - give the size of her own waist it was quite hard to bite my tongue.

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On 07/07/2021 at 08:30, spunko said:

Sorry to thread hijack but are the rules (currently) the same for mortgage renewals? I really resented sitting down with Fat Tracey at the bank last time and having her go through my bank statements and querying my purchases, the nosey cow. Surely that can't be legal?

I still remember her querying why I spent so much at Tesco one time - give the size of her own waist it was quite hard to bite my tongue.

When me + mrs spy took on out mortgage ~5 years ago, we had the full MMR plus more - HSBC.

P60s, bank accounts -- although that was automatics as I bank with FD.

I think its got stricter since then. Banks really dont want to lend money to a lot of people.

And this was for a ~LTE of ~1 and ~50% mortgage LTV.

They should not being looking at whats being spent - within reason - Ive been told they black mark payments to bookies as a massive no-no.

They are just looking at what comes in and what goes out, seeing whats left.

 

 

 

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54 minutes ago, spygirl said:

When me + mrs spy took on out mortgage ~5 years ago, we had the full MMR plus more - HSBC.

P60s, bank accounts -- although that was automatics as I bank with FD.

I think its got stricter since then. Banks really dont want to lend money to a lot of people.

And this was for a ~LTE of ~1 and ~50% mortgage LTV.

They should not being looking at whats being spent - within reason - Ive been told they black mark payments to bookies as a massive no-no.

They are just looking at what comes in and what goes out, seeing whats left.

 

 

 

They'd definitely blacklist crypto payments then. Thank God I already have a mortgage.

I understand they need to see a profit & loss type situation after every month, but to query individual payments is unnecessary. Particularly when I was at the time earning probably in excess of 90% of their clients.

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leonardratso
9 minutes ago, spunko said:

They'd definitely blacklist crypto payments then. Thank God I already have a mortgage.

I understand they need to see a profit & loss type situation after every month, but to query individual payments is unnecessary. Particularly when I was at the time earning probably in excess of 90% of their clients.

she probably didnt want you getting as lardy as her. Its for your own good.

Barclays seem to be already blocking payments to binance, maybe thats for their customers own good as well, stop them gambling.

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22 minutes ago, leonardratso said:

she probably didnt want you getting as lardy as her. Its for your own good.

Barclays seem to be already blocking payments to binance, maybe thats for their customers own good as well, stop them gambling.

When they start blocking payments to Bet365 I'll probably agree...

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20 minutes ago, spunko said:

When they start blocking payments to Bet365 I'll probably agree...

I can safely say the owner of Bet365 isn't lardy

licensed-image?q=tbn:ANd9GcQyZRC3Of_J35R

 

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4 minutes ago, leonardratso said:

and ill bet she doesnt gamble either.

Oh she did - by selling the old shops back in 2000 or so to get the money required to develop the software.

Also their business model is very much centred around not getting caught providing gambling in countries where it's not allowed.  

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sancho panza
On 30/06/2021 at 22:05, With a crooked smile said:

When you agree to rent a place through a lettings agent a credit check is supposedly done and they check your income. 

I suspect I earn more than my landlord but my rent is only £775 a month for a 3 bed barn conversion. We're beyond our 6 month term on the agreement and nothing has been mentioned about rent increases. We have a cat and a dog so moving is a pain. Is it likely they will look at my income and think mmm we can up that easily? 

Gerenally,they're not daft with regard voids.Bad for business.>If you raise the rent £50 on your £775 but get a two months void as a result then it'll take them 31 months to earn back the lsot revenue with the new profit.

Key thing to remember is that you can say 'no' to viewings.It;s a big bat to beat the fuckers with.They always argue that 'it's in your contract'....but crucially it's unenforcaable at law as it contradicts your right to quiet enjoyment which is granted by statute.

Staute trumps unfair contract term every time.

Even if a Landlord had a go at getting a judgement they'd have to prove a loss which would be very hard and cost them £200 an hour in legal fees.

Just not worht it.I've ragged a couple of Landlords hard in my time when they've been complete arseholes.One of them got particularly shirty when I said no viewings until my solicitor rang the LA to give him the good news he'd need a court order to get in for viewings.I am lukcy in that I can afford a sol but I do it for the people that can't and could eb coming behind me.

We recently agreed a £50 increase for our Landlord but that was mainly because I felt sorry for him.He's making nothing and has been forced to spend a fair bit this year.

 

 

LA's and EA's are jsut above the politicval class in London more genereally.I'd never turst them,they have no legal right to see your bank statements as part of a credit check as I undestand it.

edit to add

https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/housing/renting-privately/private-renting/checks-your-landlord-or-letting-agent-will-make/

image.png.0d681b3b6e940cb4d28aa81955fe3881.png

 

On 07/07/2021 at 09:30, spunko said:

Sorry to thread hijack but are the rules (currently) the same for mortgage renewals? I really resented sitting down with Fat Tracey at the bank last time and having her go through my bank statements and querying my purchases, the nosey cow. Surely that can't be legal?

I still remember her querying why I spent so much at Tesco one time - give the size of her own waist it was quite hard to bite my tongue.

MMR gives them stautory right to look at yourt spending.Ref renting,I think they can use the bank statements to check your income,not sure they're allowed to look at your spending.

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leonardratso

hmm, santander blocking payments to binance now. Bet365 not far behind.

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