Joint tenancy or room-by-room? Student landlords need to look again

Five students rent a house together. Four are happy, the rent is being paid and they want to stay. The fifth decides to leave and gives notice.

Under a joint periodic tenancy, that notice can end the tenancy for all five.

That isn’t a new principle of landlord and tenant law. One joint tenant has long been able to end a periodic joint tenancy without the agreement of the others. What has changed is its importance to student landlords now that assured student tenancies are periodic rather than fixed term. Current guidance confirms that a valid notice from one joint tenant ends the periodic tenancy for all of them.

Under the old student model, a group might sign a 12-month fixed term. If one student wanted to leave after six months, moving out did not by itself end their liability. In practice, that gave the group a strong incentive to find an acceptable replacement.

Now one student can give notice and bring the whole joint tenancy to an end.

So, should student landlords abandon joint tenancies and let each room separately? There is an obvious attraction.

If five students have five individual tenancies and one gives notice, the other four tenancies continue. The landlord has one room to fill rather than having to deal with the end of the tenancy for the entire house.

But that does not make room-by-room letting an automatic answer.

A joint tenancy is administratively simple. There is one agreement covering the household and the students have chosen the people they want to live with.

Individual tenancies mean managing each letting separately. If someone leaves halfway through the academic year, the landlord may have to find a replacement prepared to move into an established household of strangers.

There is also the question of the mortgage and insurance.

Before changing the way a property is let, landlords should check that the proposed arrangement remains within the terms of their mortgage and insurance and whether either provider needs to be told about the change. It is better to establish that before altering the letting model than assume that five individual agreements will be treated in exactly the same way as one joint agreement.

Joint tenancies still have advantages. Separate agreements remove one particular risk, but bring a different management model with them.

The real change is that landlords can no longer choose between the two simply because “that’s how I’ve always let my student houses”.

For anyone planning their 2027 student lets, the question is now a practical one: which risk would you rather manage?

The risk that one student’s notice ends the joint tenancy, or the additional work and complications that come with letting room by room?

That decision needs to be made property by property, not by changing every tenancy agreement in the portfolio because one option initially looks safer.

Peter Littlewood has worked with landlords for many years through iHowz Landlord Association and now delivers landlord and agent training through B-Informed, including on the Renters’ Rights Act, student lettings and HMO management.