Tenants - do you know your credit score?

When you apply for a tenancy with us (and most landlords and agents) a credit and ID check will be carried out as part of the referencing process. We still get tenants who don’t seem to know about things like CCJs (County Court Judgements) on their credit files and seem surprised when we tell them they have come up on our search. We also get tenants who say they don’t have good credit and worry about a score but everything comes up fine when we search.

We suggest that before you apply to rent a property to get to know your own credit history.

If you don’t already check it regularly sign up with one of the FREE credit checking services.

For example through Martin Lewis’s site: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/creditclub/

This allows you to view your Experian credit report and score. The score isn’t something we look at when renting you a property, but other issues like debts, CCJs that you might not even know about can be a problem.

You can also view other credit reference agencies data by signing up with Credit Karma for your Transunion information https://www.creditkarma.co.uk/

Or with Clearscore for your Equifax information https://www.clearscore.com/

We can actually take tenants with CCJs in some cases, but our biggest issue is often when someone comes to us and says they have no problems and then we find a CCJ! At this point we have to try and decide if they were lying to us or genuinely didn’t know about it. Either case isn’t great, so we’d much rather you really know your situation and are honest at the point of application.