Landlord Portal and market rent, shared ownership properties and RPs

Hello

We have the Landlord Portal and verify rent for our social tenants on this. However we also have some market rent and shared ownership properties. I had assumed we couldn’t verify these rents on the portal as they are more like private tenants. We have previously told these tenants to take their Tenancy Agreement to Jobcentre although it rarely came up.  Now I am questioning myself - particularly as we are getting more of them via the Portal as these tenants are losing jobs due to CV19..

Does anyone know if we can also use the Landlord Portal to verify these?

The guidance here https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/universal-credit-landlord-portal-and-trusted-partner-scheme-for-social-landlords/landlord-portal-and-trusted-partner-scheme-for-social-landlords says:

4. Is the Universal Credit Landlord Portal available to all landlords?
The Universal Credit Landlord Portal is only available to registered social landlords and not private landlords.

5. Who can access the Universal Credit Landlord Portal?
You may be able to access the Landlord Portal if:
•you’re a social rented sector landlord
•you have general needs properties as part of your housing stock
•you let these properties below market rent through a housing register

Not sure if point 5 requires all the 3 bullet points above to be correct or just one of them?

Any one else in same situation?

Rushing in to answer… I don’t think you can get your shared ownership properties on the portal because I think only claimants who click on the council/housing association landlord option go through the automatic selection procedure for the portal. It checks whether the tenant’s address matches one that you have uploaded in your list (on the Properties tab), and if not then it checks whether the tenant says their landlord name is exactly the same as the one you have supplied to UC.

I’ve just done a reclaim with a shared-ownership tenant and it reminded me that you can’t actually say what your housing costs are if you say you’re in shared ownership. This tenant has learning difficulties and lost her job last summer due to Covid. She claimed UC in August but only got the standard allowance (minus deductions) - with no housing costs. She got a part-time job in November which lasted a month, and her UC stopped. She couldn’t get anybody to sit with her and look at any of this (because of Covid), and so has had no income since then - luckily she had a £500 tax rebate in January, so she’s been living off that (although not paying mortgage, rent, CT, etc.).

I can see I posted in December 2019 about the problem of not being able to report housing costs if you click on shared ownership. It seems absolutely bizarre to me that this is still how it works. Does this mean that you only get HC in shared ownership if you chase it up? Are there huge numbers of people in shared ownership who are just not getting what they’re entitled to? Maybe this would be a good FOI request - how many people are on UC as shared ownership, and how many of those have a HC element?