The requirement for landlords – or their agents – to check the immigration status of all tenants from this October should not be under-estimated.

Tony Williams, managing director of tenancy referencing firm UKtenantdata, said the new requirement could be a sleeping dog that wakes up to bite.

He said: “It will not be unlike the Overseas Landlord Tax Scheme which was launched in 1998.

“It was a sleeping dog that awoke in 2004.

“It resulted in thousands of audits on agents, and subsequently cost agents thousands of pounds in tax they should have collected.

“My point is that this change in legislation should be taken seriously, and agents need to implement and maintain a process of ongoing applicant immigration status, as a failure to do this will result in heavy fines.”

Williams said his own firm will be including immigration checking as part of its service, and will include ongoing checks – also a legal requirement which could be of more concern to agents than the need for preliminary checks before the start of a tenancy.

Williams said his firm has made sizeable investments in new technology to cope with the requirements under the Immigration Act.

He said: “Our reference turnaround time will remain unchanged at around 48 hours.

“We have made the process of obtaining and validating the requisite documentation easy for our clients, and are currently building a reference library of documentation and visa types that the agent can refer to.

“Our OCR technology (Optical Character Recognition) will allow the agent to scan a passport, EU ID card, etc,  using either their mobile device or a simple web cam in their office.

“The software will extract the textual data including the MRZ code from the document and our system will validate this using a complex algorithm. This will take a couple of seconds and will produce a valid or invalid result.

“The information that is extracted will be auto-populated in the agent’s immigration dashboard and will allow them to enter visa expiry dates for the purpose of managing the applicant’s ongoing visa status.

“We hope by making these checks and validations as part of our overall application process our clients will not find the change in legislation such an onerous task to manage.”