Guarantor Services

Two reasons. The first is legal. Under the Tenant Fees Act 2019, a landlord or agent can require a suitable guarantor as a condition of granting the tenancy, but they cannot lawfully require you to take out a particular third-party service, loan, or insurance contract to satisfy that condition. That principle is explicit on GOV.UK. You can use a UK-based personal guarantor, a university guarantor scheme if your institution offers one, or any professional guarantor service of your own choice. We do not require, and cannot lawfully require, you to use any specific provider.

The second is practical. The market is not as transparent as renters need it to be. A handful of providers publish clear fees, cover limits, and refund terms. Several operate on quote-only models. Some only work where the letting agent uses a particular platform. For central London, the monthly-rent-cap test matters because several products cap the whole tenancy — university schemes at roughly £1,000 to £1,500 per month, Goodlord at £5,000 for student tenancies (£8,000 for professionals and non-students), RentBuddy at £5,000 — while others can support much higher rents. The result is that students and overseas tenants — the people most likely to need a professional guarantor under the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 — are also the people least equipped to compare like-for-like.

We rent a lot of properties to international students taking private residential tenancies above £3,000 per month, in areas where the choice is not “halls or here” but “private rental or no London course”. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 removed the old workaround of paying six or twelve months’ rent up front (only one month’s rent in advance is now permitted after the first payment cycle). For those tenants, a professional guarantor service is usually the only practical route. Rather than hand them one product, we did the research properly and published it.

We use Goodlord for tenant referencing on most of our managed lettings. Where the rent is within Goodlord’s eligibility caps (raised in 2026 to £5,000 per calendar month for student tenancies, £8,000 for professionals and non-students) and Goodlord referencing is already running, Goodlord Guarantor is our operational default — and most tenants who take that route end up choosing it. The reason is friction. The application, identity verification, right-to-rent check, referencing, contract execution, first-month rent collection, and guarantor onboarding all sit on a single integrated platform. The tenant does not have to assemble documents in one place, upload them to a guarantor provider in another, wait for two separate decisions, and reconcile two payment flows. For in-cap tenancies, especially all-student households — which Goodlord assesses without any earned-income requirement — that operational fit is real and material. We have built the worked end-to-end pathway specifically for student lettings — see our Student Lettings page.

We publish this comparison page so that the default is a choice you have confirmed, not one you have been steered into. Three groups of tenants should look harder at the alternatives below. First, anyone whose rent is above Goodlord’s caps — £5,000 per calendar month for student tenancies, £8,000 for professionals and non-students. Goodlord is not eligible at those rents and the question is which of RentGuarantor, Housing Hand, or flatfair is the right substitute. Second, joint tenancies where each tenant’s individual share matters more than the headline rent, because some products cover share-only and some cover the whole tenancy on different terms. Third, tenants who actively prefer instalment payments, a different fee structure, or a different cover scope (some products cover damages and dilapidations as well as rent; Goodlord’s product covers rent only). Outside those three groups, Goodlord is usually the practical answer — and we will say so when you ask. Inside them, the rest of this page is the working comparison.

For overseas students entering central London on a private residential tenancy, the fastest route is to have your documents assembled before viewing or offering. Most providers ask for some combination of the following. Have these ready as PDFs:

Passport or national ID. Right-to-rent share code (UK government scheme) or alternative immigration evidence. University offer letter, enrolment letter, or CAS document. Student ID once issued. Proof of current address in your home country. Bank statements (typically the most recent three months). Scholarship or sponsorship evidence if applicable. Evidence of family contribution if family are paying. Full property and rent details for the proposed tenancy, ideally including the agent’s reference.

Housing Hand asks for proof of study, proof of ID, and co-signer details. RentBuddy asks international tenants for immigration documents, share code, or settled or pre-settled status. UCL asks its own students for funding evidence, bank statements, tenancy details, and household income evidence where family support is expected. The exact list varies by provider, but if you have the items above ready you will not be the bottleneck.

For any tenancy we manage, the landlord’s requirement is for a suitable guarantor — meaning one the landlord will accept. That is the language in the tenancy file and the language we use in conversation. We are not in a position to require a particular provider, and we will not pretend otherwise to a tenant who would prefer a different one.

In practice, our operational defaults are these. For student tenancies within Goodlord’s cap — since 2026, £5,000 per month — we have built and tested a Goodlord Guarantor pathway end-to-end, including international payment from outside the UK and the no-earned-income route Goodlord allows where all tenants are students. That pathway is documented at Student Lettings and we are happy to run it where the tenant chooses it. The typical central London four-bed shared student flat at £4,500 to £4,800 per month, which the old £3,000 cap excluded, now fits that pathway. For student tenancies above £5,000 per month — or professional households above £8,000 — Goodlord is not eligible by its own published caps, and one of RentGuarantor.com, Housing Hand, or flatfair is usually the workable route. For overseas tenants whose UK credit file is thin or non-existent, the ranking above (with the central London rent test applied to each candidate) is the starting point. For tenants with a UK-resident friend or family member who would prefer to sign personally rather than pay for a corporate product, a personal guarantor remains the right answer.

If you would like our view on which provider is likely to be accepted on a particular property, ask. We will tell you what we know about the landlord’s preferences and any platform integration that affects availability, but the choice is yours.

If you instruct us as your letting agent, the guarantor question is one we will handle openly with the tenant. We do not market a tenancy as guarantor-required-and-must-be-X. We market it as guarantor-required-where-applicable, with the option list above as the tenant’s research starting point. That is what the Tenant Fees Act 2019 requires of us. It is also what gives an applicant the confidence that the tenancy they are paying to enter is one they have chosen freely rather than been steered into.

The practical landlord upside of running guarantor questions this way is that the corporate guarantor products that do attach to your tenancy attach because the tenant chose them on the basis of cover and cost — which means the tenant is bought in to making the product work. The downside, such as it is, is that a tenant exercising free choice may pick a smaller or less-known provider than we would have offered as default. Where that happens, we will make the suitability assessment with you — is this provider acceptable to you for this tenancy — and document the acceptance decision before move-in.

Our Student Lettings page sets out the worked operational pathway we have built for full-time Higher Education students choosing the Goodlord Guarantor route, including the international payment workflow, the under-eligibility rules for the income test, the family-payment mechanics, and the China Desk for Mandarin-speaking families. Our Overseas Landlords page is the parallel landlord-facing resource for overseas property owners whose tenancies are most likely to involve a guarantor service. Our Tenants page sets out the end-to-end tenant journey from application to keys. Our Holding Deposits page explains the holding-deposit mechanics that interact with the referencing flow. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 page gives the legal context for why the one-month-in-advance limit removed the old twelve-months-upfront workaround that students previously used.