to not get why I'm being turned down for rental properties?

[Fpbww]

In our town (don't know if this is common in other areas) the process for renting is - view house you are interested in, submit a detailed application form (the longest has been 8 pages long) confirming employers, income, bank details, addresses and so on. Sometimes providing ID, bank statements, wage slips, you name it.

The landlord then has a look at the applications and decides who he/ she likes the look of best. And if you get to that stage, THEN they do any referencing, credit checks etc.

We've applied for 5 houses in the last month. We were offered one (having passed stage 1 we were invited to agree referencing/ checks), but decided due to some concerns over maintenance (a couple of damp patches which the LL tried to say were not actually damp!) we decided not to proceed.

With the other 4, we've been rejected at the first stage.

All different estate agents (there are about 20 locally) so it's not that

I can't see why on paper we are not attractive to a LL?
We're both in our 40s, no children at home, non smokers, no pets. We both work from home. We're looking to rent for up to 2 years.
Our joint salary is 3x the affordability criteria. DP is a director of his own small business, which I know is not always attractive to landlords, but his earnings are 50% of mine, so even if you didn't include his salary I could more than afford the place on my own.

Am I missing something? We needed to give notice this week but now are holding off as there doesn't seem much chance of finding something else quickly.

@Fpbww

My DP absolutely wouldn't want to overlap by a month, he refuses to waste money like that.

On one of the houses we applied for, the tenant was moving out after 20/11 - not sure when but could have been a few days later.

We'd asked to start on 25/11, which we hoped would give at least 3 days between tenant moving out and us moving in, and of course was still an overlap for DP of 10 days or so.

Clearly we don't know if that was the reason we were turned down, but could be I suppose if another applicant had said 'immediately' and landlord wanted them in from the day, or day after tenant left.

In my experience, letting agents will no longer allow for a house turned around in a day. So the date will probably have been in a perfectly acceptable. However, next time I would say ASAP. You’re going to have to take the hit or sit there for a long time waiting. That’s really your choice. It’s a landlord’s market at the moment. I had several prospective tenants after the last property I put on the market.

I didn't say DP wouldn't agree any overlap, he'd prefer to keep it to 7-14 days rather than an entire month of paying 2 lots of rent, utilities, council tax etc. He hasn't got £1000 lying around to cover that overlap.

We didn't say asap, or similar on the forms because we didn't want to be disingenuous. Our concern is if we do that and the landlord says fine, tenancy starts tomorrow (or in 3 days or whatever), we'd end up with DP paying 2 lots of everything for at least a month which he wouldn't do, or we'd end up asking the landlord if instead of immediately they'd agree 2-3 weeks time which they'll probably refuse. So we're possibly not going to be any better off.

DP was considering handing in his notice anyway, and hoping something would turn up in the next month but we've decided against that as no guarantee anything suitable will come up, or we may still be rejected if there are other reasons for rejection that either we've not considered or are out of our control.

You’re seriously overthinking this and shooting yourselves in the foot. Agents allow approximately 2 weeks to turn paperwork around. Asap is fine.

We have rented lovely big houses in nice areas for 20 years and landlords like us because we have consistency of renting, have had the same business for 20 years and are married and hsve a string of good references on similar houses One landlord told me he wasn't keen on tenants who had sold up and were waiting to buy again because they had got used to treating their house exactly as they wanted and could easily skip payments knowing they wouldnt need referencing to buy , at the end of the day if there are more interested parties than one then agents and landlords can choose whatever criteria they want, however illogical it might seem -- as you say OP we have missed out in the past due to dates not coinciding and a landlord having to wait 2 weeks their loss, they missed out on really good long term tenants