This page is intended to answer some of the most common questions we have been asked by letting agents. If your question has not been answered here, please get in touch at housing@london.ac.uk.
FAQs
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1. What is the ULHS Property Platform?
The University of London Housing Services Property Platform allows you to advertise your properties to our registered students. Students from our member institutions use our database to find a new home.
The platform will bring many technological advances including an agency dashboard to allow you to track how your adverts are performing and an API to allow you to automatically send properties from your own systems to be advertised on our platform.
After paying the initial one off set up fee, agents will be able to list unlimited properties and will only be charged when accepting viewing requests.
To keep updated on this, join our mailing list.
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2. Pricing & Payments
Prices for Letting Agents
One-off set up fee: £300
Per Room Per Property Viewing Booking Fee £3 £6 The Viewing Booking Fee be charged on any viewing successfully booked using the property platform.
Boosting / Featured listings
You can 'boost' your advert and have it appear as a Featured Listing for an additional fee. This fee varies depending on the time of year.
Peak (February - September) Off-peak (October-January) Agent boost per property/ room £25 £10 Please note that our new platform does not accept American Express (AMEX) or cards registered outside the UK & EU for payments. This is due to the cost of processing these payment types. If you use one of these incompatible cards on our platform you will be shown an error message and should then use a different card type to proceed.
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4. Registration Requirements
We will check that all new agents are members of a client money protection and redress scheme.
In addition to this, we currently ask that any letting agents registered with us are a member of one of the following four schemes:
- ARLA (Association of Residential Letting Agents)
- NALS (National Approved Letting Scheme)
- RICS (Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors)
- TPO (The Property Ombudsman)
These schemes have been judged to have satisfactory complaints and redress procedures for our students, as well as robust written codes of practice, the requirement for members to hold professional indemnity insurance and demonstrate appropriate client money accounting procedures.
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5. Can I set up an API?
We have an API that allows you to automatically upload properties on to the database. For a copy of our guide on setting this up, please contact us.
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6. Advertising opportunities
We offer additional advertising opportunities on our website and in emails to students. There are also opportunities to sponsor some of our events, such as the Landlord Forum, Flatmate Finder Event and Housing Fair. Contact us for more information.
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7. How Are Students And Staff verified on the platform?
We collect photo ID and a copy of the student’s ID or an offer to study letter to verify their status as a student at one of our registered member institutions. You can find the full list of those here.
For university staff members, we collect photo ID and staff ID or a letter offering employment.
Please note, our ID checks are purely to check for student or staff status and do not include a full reference nor do they cover a landlord’s legal obligation to carry out ‘Right to Rent’ checks on tenants. You may wish to consider additional reference checks if you feel they are necessary.
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8. Can non-students use the platform to find properties?
The property platform is only available to students from our member institutions and University of London staff. For staff members, we still collect Photo ID and University staff ID to verify their identity.