‘Digital DNA’ to help agents and landlords check ...

New technology could help letting agents and landlords select tenants and check up on them during tenancies.

Tenant Assured uses automated social profiling technology to trawl through tenants' social media accounts to pick up on personality traits.

The tenant has to give their consent and can choose which social media profiles are trawled.

Tenant Assured says that it hopes the profiling can complement traditional pre-tenancy checks such as referencing and credit checks to help landlords choose suitable tenants.

If a tenant agrees to the profiling, Tenant Assured aims to provide insights into five main personality traits which could affect the tenant-landlord relationship: extraversion, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness.

The profiling system also provides information which could be useful to agents and landlords during a tenancy.

By checking tenants' social media accounts, it will also pick up on travel patterns - showing if they are spending significant time away from the property - and life events like a change of job - which could affect their reliability as an occupier.

“We can help landlords determine the potential problem tenants and help the good ones secure the property they really want,” says Ben Stubbs, managing director of Score Assured, the parent company of Tenant Assured.

“The insights we are able to collect with the consent of the tenant will protect landlords from costs involved in collecting rent arrears, evictions or repairing damage to their property.”

“Currently landlords rely on third parties to pull together traditional checks. Our product can add another layer of security to this by helping landlords get to know their prospective tenants so much better,” he adds.

Score Assured says it is currently in advanced discussions with a number of traditional referencing firms.