The Renters' Rights Act, in the only terms that matter to a letting agent

There is a lot written about the Renters' Rights Act and most of it is either a summary of the bill's passage through Parliament or a warning about landlords leaving the sector. Neither is much use on a Monday morning. What a letting agent actually needs is a short list of the things that work differently now, and an honest statement of which numbers are settled and which are not.

Start with what is structural, because the structure is not going to move.

Section 21 is not a route any more. No-fault possession is gone, and every possession now runs through a ground in Schedule 2. This is not a change to a form, it is a change to how you plan. An agency that was quietly relying on section 21 as the fallback whenever a tenancy got difficult no longer has a fallback, and the practical consequence is that referencing, record keeping and early intervention matter far more than they did.

Tenancies become periodic. The fixed term followed by a statutory periodic tenancy is not the default shape any more. A periodic tenancy has no end date, which means it cannot expire, which means your renewals diary is measuring something that no longer happens. If your systems are built around a tenancy end date, they are built around a thing that mostly will not exist.

Rent increases become a served notice rather than a clause in an agreement. A rise is proposed by a section 13 notice, it has a notice period, it takes effect from a date after that period, and it can happen only once in any twelve months. That is four separate facts your records need to hold, and the one that catches agencies is the twelve-month rule, because it is about history rather than about the current notice. You cannot answer it correctly without knowing when the last rise took effect.

Now the honest part. The provisions commence in stages, by regulations, and notice periods are exactly the kind of number that moves between a bill and its commencement order. We take the view that a system should not assert those numbers with false confidence. Foundation holds them as defaults that an agency confirms and can change, recorded on that agency's own file with the date they last confirmed them, and the code never hard-codes one.

That division is deliberate and we would recommend the same discipline whatever software you use. Enforce the shape, because the shape is certain and worth enforcing: a rent rise needs a notice, a notice has a period, a period counts from a date, two rises inside twelve months is not allowed. Prompt for the numbers, because they belong to the legislation rather than to your software vendor.

The three things worth doing this month, regardless of where commencement has got to:

Find out, for every tenancy on your books, when rent last went up. Not approximately. If you cannot answer that from your records you will not be able to serve a valid notice when you need to.

Stop diarising tenancy end dates as though they are events. Replace them with the things that do still happen on a schedule: compliance certificates, inspections, deposit protection deadlines.

Write down, once, in a place your whole office can see, which notice periods you are working to and the date somebody checked them. Not because the number is hard, but because the alternative is four people each remembering a different one.

This is not legal advice and we are not solicitors. It is a description of what changes shape, written for people who have to operate it.