How it works
What we check, and what we will not claim
RenterCheck reads public datasets about a property and lays out what they record. There is no scoring, no ranking and no judgement about the people involved.
What each report shows you
The free check covers the property and the area from public records. Complete RenterCheck contains all of it and adds the money, the ownership, the licensing and the rest of the neighbourhood.
The property
Property details: type, age, size and tenure
Free and Complete RenterCheck
Energy certificate: the rating and how it is heated
Free and Complete RenterCheck
Flood zone, conservation area and listed building status
Free and Complete RenterCheck
Sale history from HM Land Registry
Free and Complete RenterCheck
Flood risk from rivers, the sea and surface water
Surface water shown separately, which the planning zones leave out.
Complete RenterCheck only
Planning applications for the building and nearby
Complete RenterCheck only
The money
The rent you have been quoted, recorded on the report
Free and Complete RenterCheck
How that rent compares with similar homes advertised nearby
With the adverts behind it: each home’s rent, distance and how long it has been listed.
Complete RenterCheck only
Monthly running costs: council tax, energy, water and broadband
Complete RenterCheck only
Your share of the bills, and what is left after rent
Complete RenterCheck only
Deposit and upfront payments against the legal limits
Complete RenterCheck only
The landlord and the letting
The registered owner from HM Land Registry
A company owner is named and checked on Companies House. A private owner is not named: the report says so and links to the title register that does.
Complete RenterCheck only
HMO licence and council licensing schemes
Complete RenterCheck only
Your tenancy agreement checked against the report
Upload it and we compare the address, rent, deposit, fees and licensing, and flag terms written on old templates.
Complete RenterCheck only
The area
Crime recorded nearby
Complete sets it against 500 places sampled across England, so you can tell an ordinary figure from a high one.
Free and Complete RenterCheck
Nearest schools, with Ofsted and exam results
Complete RenterCheck only
Stations and buses, and your journey to work
Complete RenterCheck only
Mobile signal from each network
Complete RenterCheck only
Broadband speeds predicted at the home
Complete RenterCheck only
Nearest GP, pharmacy, supermarket and park
Complete RenterCheck only
Road and rail noise, and air pollution
Complete RenterCheck only
Using the report
Every finding carries its source and the date we read it
Free and Complete RenterCheck
Your questions for the agent, written to send
Complete RenterCheck only
A private link to share with a parent or guarantor
Complete RenterCheck only
England only, and every check depends on the property being matched in each dataset. Where it cannot be, the report says so rather than showing a clean result.
Checking your tenancy agreement
Every other check reads a public record about the property. This one reads the document you have been asked to sign, and compares it with everything else the report found. Upload it as a PDF or as photographs of the pages.
What it compares
- The address, the rent and the deposit against what the report established.
- Fees and upfront payments against the legal limits.
- Who the agreement says the landlord is, against the registered owner.
- Whether the home needs a licence the agreement does not mention.
What it gives you
- Terms that appear to conflict with the law, or to have no effect under it, with the clause and page for each.
- Terms written on templates that predate 1 May 2026, such as a fixed term or a section 21 clause.
- Anything in the agreement that does not match the report.
- Every point written as a question you can send to the agent.
We do not keep the agreement
An agreement carries a lot of personal information, about you and about other people. It is held in memory only while it is read, and is never written to our database or file storage. What we save is the findings, in our own words, with clause and page numbers. How we handle it, in full.
It is an automated reading and it can be wrong, so check each point against the clause it names before you rely on it. It is not legal advice, and a term it does not raise is not a term we have approved. More about the agreement checker.
What a RenterCheck does not show you
These are limits of the records themselves, so they apply to both reports. Paying more does not buy an opinion we are not in a position to have.
- A score, a rating or a verdict
- There is no overall number, no grade and no ranking against other homes. Nothing in the available data could support one honestly, and a score invites you to stop reading at the number.
- Whether the landlord or agent is any good
- We publish no ratings or reviews of people. Public registers record what a landlord is, not how they behave when the boiler fails in January.
- Whether the property is safe
- We hold no inspection data. An energy assessor is not a surveyor, and a certificate is not a condition report. Damp, wiring, the roof and the boiler are things to look at and ask about.
- What it is like to live there
- Noise through the wall, the neighbours, how the light falls in the afternoon, whether the shower runs hot. A viewing tells you these and no dataset does.
- Whether you should rent it
- The report lays out what the records say so the decision is yours on better information. It never makes the decision, and it never tells you a home is fine.
Which is why the report is a starting point and not a substitute for looking. Go and see the place, and take the 25 questions to ask before renting with you. The answers to those come from the agent, the landlord and your own eyes, and no data product can give them to you.
Five result states
Every finding in a report is one of five things. There is no safe or unsafe, no good or bad landlord, and no trust score, because the available data cannot support any of them.
- Action needed
- A clear-cut problem to sort out before you sign or pay, such as a tenancy agreement term that conflicts with the law, or a company owner that Companies House lists as dissolved.
- Worth checking
- Something was found that deserves a question before you commit. It is a prompt to ask, not a conclusion about the property or the landlord.
- Nothing flagged
- The check was completed in a named dataset and found nothing to raise. It says what we checked, not that the home is fine.
- For information
- Useful facts, such as the schools or buses nearby, with no conclusion either way.
- Not checked
- The check could not reliably be completed, because a source was unreachable, or because the property could not be matched. We never turn this into a clean result.
Where the information comes from
Every section of a report carries its source, the date we retrieved it, the record reference where there is one, and a plain statement of what it does not establish. You can open that on any finding in your report. See the full list of sources.
When something goes wrong
Each check runs independently. If one source is down or slow, that section reads “unavailable” and the rest of the report still generates. A data failure is never converted into a positive finding, because “flood risk: none” after a timeout would be a lie that costs somebody money.
Where we cover
England only, for now. Several of the datasets and all of the deposit rules differ in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and covering them properly means doing the work rather than assuming the English answer applies.