Enhancing fraud detection in the rental market

As a landlord, being cognisant of the risks of rental fraud is essential when choosing your next tenants, especially when you consider that the financial pressures faced by many in the last year or so have done little to ease the problem of tenancy fraud. In the last year alone, fraud within the lettings industry has surged by a third and with financial pressures continuing until interest rates and mortgage rates begin to fall it’s unlikely to ease any time soon.  

But as quickly as tenancy fraud becomes more sophisticated so, too, do the efforts to combat it - with AI technology playing a vital role in this relentless game of cat and mouse. The advantages of AI technology are huge. AI can number crunch data much faster and more efficiently than has been possible before, quickly sifting through datasets and identifying anomalies that can be an indicator of fraud.

It can also be used to power other technologies such as optical character recognition and natural language processing to spotlight inconsistencies on forms and red flags that could be indicative of fraud.

And the beauty of AI is its learning capabilities, meaning that as it learns what is and isn’t fraudulent, its power to detect fraud also increases. 

Incorporating AI into the tenant referencing process enables the letting agent or managing agent looking after your property to check all the forms that prospective tenants may use as part of their tenancy application, whether such documents are a PDF, image or scanned copy. This can be used to highlight uncommon changes or strange pixilation that could indicate forged images or documents.

At this point any suspicious activities such as these can be flagged by the system, allowing a human to sense check to help evaluate whether tenancy fraud is taking place. 

The sophistication of rental fraud today means that the checks that you might have once done yourself as a landlord may no longer be good enough to catch those potentially wanting to deceive. Tenancy fraud has become more complex and it’s essential to keep up with the challenges it poses, using agents that invest in tenant referencing services that have AI at their heart. Using AI within the tenant referencing process helps to bolster security for both landlords and tenants alike, providing yet another safeguard in the fight against rental fraud. 

In 2024, HomeLet proudly launched VISTA, an industry-first tenant referencing solution which utilises cutting-edge document forgery detection software and HomeLet AI to minimise the risk of tenancy fraud. 

HomeLet AI provides a digital forensic assessment of the history of an electronic document. It can assess its metadata to identify:

• When the document was created

• If any edits have been made to it

• What these edits are

• What it has changed from

• Which editing tools have been used on it

The solution also self-learns based on previous assessments and registers when certain organisations have made visual changes to the documents, such as branding or formatting.

VISTA is the result of an investment of over £3 million and three years of research and development combined with over 30 years of specialist industry expertise and proprietary data. The solution harnesses the power of data, technology, and human expertise to deliver a fully optimised tenant referencing solution, offering the highest level of protection for letting agents and landlords.

Find out more here.