#AskTDS: “What makes TDS different?”

This article has been written in response to a landlord query: “What makes TDS different?”

The TDS team attends numerous landlord and agent events throughout the year and one of the most common questions asked is “What makes TDS different?”. The fact that the TDS experts attend so many of these events is unique in its own right as it shows our commitment to educating landlords and agents on their responsibilities relating to deposit protection.  The Tenancy Deposit Scheme is a government approved scheme for the protection of tenancy deposits which offers both an Insured and Custodial deposit protection service and is the only not for profit scheme available. This means that unlike the other tenancy deposit schemes TDS does not have  shareholders and therefore any surplus made can be reinvested back into the company and improving our already multi-award winning service.

TDS is proud of its call and e-mail answering times and is currently boasting that calls are answered within 30 seconds and emails responded to within a just few hours.  AsTDS was created by both ARLA and RICS and organisations such as RLA sit on our board, we are industry owned, regulated and influenced by the organisations who work for agents, landlords and tenants alike.

The quality of TDS’ service has won independent recognition with a range of awards including the Investors in People Accreditation, The BSI Complaints Management System Standard and the Customer Service Excellence Standard.  TDS was recently shortlisted in the Supplier of the Year – Professional Services category at The Negotiator Awards 2017 and has an on-going entry in the ESTAS Awards 2018, striving to be recognised for our dedication to improving the service we provide to our clients and our goal to raise standard in the industry.

We are also keen to promote transparency within our industry; to enable this, we release an annual report containing our call answering times, dispute turn-around times as well as other business statistics providing customers with clarity on how we operate and continue to improve year on year.

 How do I join TDS?

The Tenancy Deposit Insured Scheme has no joining fee for either landlords or agents; you can join quickly and easily online with no obligations to pay anything if you have no deposits protected with us.As a landlord, to protect deposits with us, all you need is a UK bank account to hold the deposit and you must be the owner and landlord of the property. You can “pay as you go”, paying us per tenancy deposit protected.  The TDS Custodial Scheme is free to join and is a free scheme to use.

In the Insured Scheme Agents are charged on an annual subscription basis.. Each year we take a snapshot of the number of live tenancies our agent customers have registered and then an annual invoice is produced. Our agents start on a headline rate; discounts are available for agents depending on the usage of our scheme, effectively the lower your dispute ratio the more discount we’re able to offer. TDS also offers the option to pay the annual invoice in full or monthly or quarterly instalments at no additional cost.  Again the Custodial Scheme is Free to use.

You can find out more about which scheme is best for you by visiting: https://www.tenancydepositscheme.com

The Tenancy Deposit Scheme (TDS) is a government approved scheme for the protection of tenancy deposits; we offer both insured and custodial protection. We also provide fair adjudication for disputes that arise over the tenancy deposits that we protect.

TDS can only comment on the process for our scheme, other deposit protection schemes may have a different process/require different steps. Content is correct at the time of writing.