Caught the BBC Panorama documentary on tenant fraud a couple of weeks back and it's properly stayed with me since, "There's a Gangster in My Flat" if you want to look it up. What got me wasn't the fraud itself, it was how normal the paperwork looked. Every landlord in it had a tenant who'd passed referencing cleanly. That's exactly how the properties ended up as drug factories and a brothel, nobody was fooled by a dodgy application, they were fooled by a good one. LegalforLandlords surveyed 1,000 landlords alongside it. 77% think it's getting worse, one in ten have already been hit, and almost a quarter of those lost £5,000 or more on one case. I've written up exactly how we check for that gap, the bit that comes after referencing, on the blog going up today. Link's below once it's live, worth five minutes if you own rental property anywhere, not just here. Message me if you want to talk through your own situation. Keeshan

Posted by Keeshan at 2026-07-30 09:22:18 UTC