
Eva Kolker
Princpal Advisor
Almost two years ago the Centre for Homelessness Impact (CHI) commissioned BIT to identify ways to increase the willingness of landlords to rent to people receiving housing benefits. We have worked with CHI and the National Residential Landlord Association (NRLA) to test ways to encourage private landlords to rent to people receiving Universal Credit (UC).
During the COVID-19 pandemic the number of people claiming UC has almost doubled (there were 4.9 million households receiving UC in November 2020, this is an increase of 2.2 million since March 2020). There is a growing need to establish effective ways to encourage private landlords to let properties to those on Universal Credit, both from a property owner and renter point of view.
To address the dearth of evidence in this space, we ran two online randomised controlled trials, using our experiment platform Predictiv, with nearly 2,700 landlords from the NRLA. We looked at the following questions:
The primary outcome for this trial was the self-reported likelihood of landlords continuing with the tenant’s application process, measured on a 7-point Likert scale (from very likely to very unlikely).
Overall, we average willingness to rent to people receiving UC was low (on average ‘somewhat unlikely’ across interventions). Average willingness to rent to someone receiving UC did not go above ‘neutral’ in any of our scenarios.
Does providing extra information encourage landlords to rent to people who receive Universal Credit? In short, no. In this trial, landlords were presented with a scenario in which a prospective tenant was applying for a one bedroom property. The property’s rent was equal to the housing benefit payment that the prospective tenant was receiving so there should not have been any concerns about how the tenant would pay the sum owed. Landlords were randomly sorted in four groups where they were presented a similar email tenancy application but with different attachments as outlined below:
None of our intervention arms significantly increased landlord willingness to rent to a person receiving UC.
Do incentives encourage landlords to rent to someone receiving UC? Probably not. For this trial we tested whether offering incentives to the landlord encouraged them to rent to a prospective tenant who is being supported by a local authority housing team. Incentives included:
We chose these incentives because they’re quite commonly offered by local authorities across England. Providing cash upfront and providing a rent guarantee were the most effective at increasing the likelihood of accepting a tenant receiving UC at below-market rent. Offering cash upfront or a rent guarantee resulted in greater increases in landlords’ likelihood to accept the offer (0.8 points on 1-7 scale) compared to offering a deposit bond or a landlord liaison officer (0.3 points). However, even with the two most effective incentives, landlords on the whole were not very inclined to accept the offers.
A summary of the report is available here, with the final technical report available on CHI’s website.
At BIT we are always trying to improve outcomes. On the face of it these trials haven’t been very successful at that aim. However we think this work is extremely valuable for a number of reasons:
Princpal Advisor
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