When you’re a young professional, there are a few certainties in your financial life: one is that you’ll spend too much on gin and tonics, another one is the standing order with which you pay the rent on the first day of the month, and the third is that the two of them combined mean you’ll only have spare change to do your grocery shopping for the remaining 29 days.
Rent doesn’t exactly come cheap these days, so why not at least use it to improve your credit history? CreditLadder can help with that. The service it offers is now over 5 years old and can now help you build a positive credit history with the 3 main UK credit reference agencies (Experian, Equifax and TransUnion).
CreditLadder is a service that allows you to have your rent payments recorded in your Experian, Equifax and TransUnion credit report. Potential lenders will be able to see them, so paying the rent on time each month will help you establish yourself as a reliable borrower who can keep up with regular payments. CreditLadder could be particularly useful for people who don’t have much of a credit history yet, to help them build one and access more affordable credit.
It’s fairly simple:
It isn’t easy to quantify, but there are a couple of things to take into account.
First of all, signing up to the scheme makes it easier to prove your identity online, which means that, for example, you may be able to open a bank account without having to provide physical proof of identity. Experian says that with the scheme, the proportion of tenants who can prove their identity online will go from 39% to 84%.
Things are trickier when it comes to actually improving your credit score. Experian says that 79% of tenants would benefit from the scheme by seeing their credit score go up. But that’s only if lenders decided to take rental data into account, which is not standard practice yet.
For now, rental records will appear on your credit file, but won’t automatically feed your Experian credit score (the silver lining being that if you pay the rent late once, it shouldn’t damage your credit score either).
An Experian spokesperson told Finder: “More than 1 million tenants now have their rent payment records included in their Experian credit report, which both they and lenders can see but it won’t have an additional impact on their credit score just yet. Several lenders are now testing the data before they incorporate it into their decision making, which is the usual process for new data sets. So it’s not yet being factored into people’s credit scores but this should soon change.”
Ultimately, like paying back a loan on time, making on-time rent payments can demonstrate to future would-be lenders that you’ve been responsible with your financial obligations.
CreditLadder launched in 2016. The CEO is Sheraz Dar, who previously worked in various digital businesses including OpenRent. CreditLadder was the first company to report to Experian’s Rental Exchange scheme.
The Rental Exchange scheme is a partnership between The Big Issue and Experian. It was born in 2010, but only since October 2018 have rent payments been appearing on tenants’ credit files.
It’s worth noting that any boost to your credit score isn’t guaranteed – if you keep up with rent payments (and CreditLadder reports these to credit agencies) but at the same time you miss credit card repayments, your score will go down not up, for example.
The basic service that includes reporting to 1 credit agency only (you can choose Experian, Equifax or TransUnion) is completely free.
If you sign up to the CreditLadder annual plan (for £60 a year/£5 a month) or CreditLadder monthly plan (for £8 a month), you will be able to report to all three agencies (Experian, Equifax and TransUnion).
Making rent count towards your credit score may seem like a fairly obvious thing to implement, but it’s actually very new. For now only CreditLadder reports rent payments to all three biggest Credit Reference Agencies in the UK.
However, instead of self-reporting through CreditLadder, you can also ask your landlord to report directly to the Experian’s Rental Exchange scheme for you. Council or social housing tenants can do it and so can private tenants if their landlord or agency manages at least 500 properties.
The other option for self-reporting is another startup called Canopy. It reports your rent payments to The Rental Exchange too, while also building a “digital rental profile” that allows you to instantly prove to potential landlords you can afford the rent, making reference and affordability checks way quicker. CreditLadder is planning a similar service, but it hasn’t launched yet.
Finally, don’t forget that there are multiple ways to build your credit history, and some are more straightforward than making your rent count. Make sure you’re on the electoral roll and try to never miss payments. You could also consider a specific credit builder product, such as LOQBOX or a credit builder credit card.
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