I'm Daria. I built BeTenant because I have been the renter it is for.
I have been evicted with two weeks' notice, then told the landlord had changed her mind, then that she hadn't. My deposit turned out never to have been protected. I once found out the person collecting my rent was subletting illegally, which left me with barely any rights at all. I reported disrepair and safety problems over and over and watched nothing get fixed.
The part that stayed with me was the silence around it. When I asked flatmates and other renters why they never complained, I heard the same things every time. I don't want to cause a problem. A bad reference. Losing the deposit. So it was always just me, and being the only one complaining made it easy for a landlord to decide the problem wasn't real, or that I was the difficult one.
BeTenant exists to end that. First for the individual renter: a record of what actually happened that nobody can edit later, the deadlines the law gives your landlord, and letters that are hard to ignore. Then for all of us together. Every problem a renter logs is one more data point in a picture the whole country has been missing. Pooled and stripped of anything personal, that picture is how we stop the pattern being deniable.
It covers England and the Renters' Rights Act for now. It is early, and it is still being shaped, partly by the renters and tenant organisers trying it and telling us what is wrong with it. If that is you, I would genuinely like to hear from you.
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