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Relationships between tenants and landlords can often be strained. Here at Springwise, we have written about a number of startups that help manage good relations. This digital platform lets landlords manage listings, collect rent and organise maintenance all in the same place. And, perhaps more sinister, this online tool allows landlords to ascertain whether tenants will be able to pay their rent by scanning social media data. Now, Guard My Lease offers a solution to the oldest cause of landlord-tenant disagreement in the book: deposits.

Guard My Lease is an app that allows users to take photos of the damage within a property and keep the photos stored in a secure location where they can be accessed when required. Designed for both tenants wanting to protect their deposit and owners or agents wanting to protect the state of the property, it works as follows. Users can activate the service at the start or during the tenancy. They upload photos of the property onto the platform which are saved in the cloud, proving when any damage dates from. Once uploaded, users can add descriptions so that the level of damage is clear, and images can be separated in room location. Guard My Lease then logs the dates and times of all photos. The startup also includes a useful report feature, from which all the information uploaded is sent straight to both tenant and landlord’s email inbox.

In 2015 we wrote about a startup that uses blockchain to store information on the provenance of diamonds, thereby preventing fraud. Will we see more startups attempting to moderate these kinds of disputes?