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.
Three result states
Every finding in a report is one of three 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.
- Checked
- Evidence in a named dataset supports a factual result. The report says which dataset, and when we retrieved it.
- Review
- 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.
- Unavailable
- 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.
What a free check will not tell you
- Whether the landlord or agent is any good. We do not publish ratings, reviews or scores, and a public register cannot support one.
- Whether the property is safe. We have no inspection data, and an EPC assessor is not a surveyor.
- Who owns the property. Registered ownership is a paid HM Land Registry service we have not built yet.
- Whether the tenancy agreement is lawful. That is a Complete RenterCheck feature and it is not live.
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 renders. An API 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.