Information For Prospective Tenants

If you are a prospective tenant looking for a rental home in Gisborne we invite you to register your name and particulars with us by completing the on-line registration form on this site. Please note that you are not required to supply any of the information requested unless you want to.

We wish to make it clear however that by accepting your registration Home Rental Services is not entering into any sort of contractual relationship with you to find you a rental home. Our obligations as a provider of Property Management services are to our homeowner clients with whom we enter into a written agency contract to perform certain tasks on their behalf, one of which is to find suitable tenants for their properties (a ‘tenant finding’ service).

In order to fulfill these ‘tenant finding’ obligations we have established a ‘Prospective Tenants List’ and all the tenancies that we arrange are selected from this list.

REGISTRATION AND INTERVIEW

In order to join our ‘Prospective Tenants List’ simply complete the relevant form either at our office or by using the ‘on-line’ registration form on this website. Once we have received the registration we will then make arrangements with you for an interview. This may be done at our office or if you live out of town via the telephone.

At this interview you will be asked to supply or forward a valid (preferably photographic) ID and any written rental or workplace references that you may possess. We will enquire about your circumstances, your reason for leaving your current address, where you have been living for the last two years, who will be living with you and we’ll also cover such topics as ownership of pets and smoking habits.

REFERENCE CHECKS

Following the interview we will make further enquiries about you by contacting your previous landlord(s); conducting credit (Veda) and/or employer checks and any other reference checks that we deem necessary. You need to be aware that the more information that you can supply us in respect of past tenancies and landlord contacts the more likely you are to be considered for one of our properties. Our assessment of merit is to a large degree based on this information.

LOOKING FOR A RENTAL HOME

Once you have registered with us we ask that you peruse our available listings either here on-line or via the window cards at our office and then take a ‘drive-by’ of the properties that may interest you. Please do not knock on the doors!!! These listings are updated on a daily basis.

Having done a drive-by and decided that you are definitely interested in a particular home we ask that you make an application for that property either on-line (see ‘Apply for Tenancy’ at the bottom of the listing) or in person at our office.

Your name will then go forward to our letting agent for inclusion on what we call a ‘long list’. From this long list a ‘short list’ will be selected based on merit and it is at this stage that you will be invited to inspect the property. A final selection will then be made and a tenancy agreement drawn up accordingly.

This whole process can sometimes take several weeks depending on the circumstances of each listing so we ask patience during this period.

SELECTION

The final selection of tenant is very often done in consultation with the property owner and is based entirely upon merit. In order to make this merit judgement we review the information gained from the registration form, the interview, the tenancy and workplace references and the credit checks and apply it to various criterion of which the ability to pay rent regularly and on time and the ability to look after and care for the rental property are paramount.

We should make it clear that we will not accept any instruction from homeowners that may contravene the Human Rights Act or any other enactment that could compromise the health, safety or wellbeing of future tenants.

UPDATING THE LIST

Updating our prospective tenants list is a daily activity with new registrations being added and older registrations being deleted. Prospects are normally kept on our list for a period of between four and six weeks.