How the Renters’ Rights Act will strengthen – not squeeze – the landlord sector

Ill assert, without evidence, that this article is a load of b0ll@x, just like the article does throughout.

I am a small private landlord with 5 x1-Bed, 2×2-Bed and and 1×8-Bed licensed HMO and Although I am not and never have been into student let’s so cannot comment on this section of the article, I do absolutely agree with the observations that landlords who do the simple things well i.e. look after their properties and tenants, have nothing to fear from the new regulations. In 16 years I have never had to evict a tenant nor has any of my properties ever been damaged by a tenant.

Initial Tenant screening and ‘careful’ management during their tenancy is enough for most tenants imho. I come from a customer service industry so perhaps my training helps but the formulae is quite simple.

Although I am not in a position to buy ATM, the supply v demand curve is definitely helping my annual yield and long may it continue.

Reply to the comment left by Mark Pickersgill at 17/04/2026 – 10:23
I manage a small business and also come from a ‘customer service industry’; it is true that with MOST tenants you don’t have a problem. However, despite careful screening and ‘careful’ management, doing everything that a good landlord should do and more, I HAVE had tenants damage properties over more than a twenty year period. I’ve also had tenants damage property even though the property was under the management of an agent, and struggled to do anything about it because of difficulty with getting EVIDENCE of misuse.

Just as most small portfolio landlords do a good job, most tenants aren’t bad tenants, and most landlords want good, long-term tenants, the problem arises with the small portion of tenants who do a LOT of damage and who sometimes you cannot get rid of. These tenants are a disproportionate amount of your cost and in the end if you have a portfolio you have to spread the costs of these bad tenants across the rest of your good tenants. Once you’ve experienced tenants like that, or know landlords whose properties have been trashed and have had to spend maybe a year or more going to court to get them back in an unrentable state, you look for the holes in the legislation: But most landlords don’t look for holes in the legislation in order to EVADE their responsibilities, they look for the holes in order to protect themselves from the small proportion of wrongdoers that spoil everything for everybody.

At the moment I don’t have much to fear from the Renters Rights Act as far as I can see, although the effect of the Renters Rights Act is that my agent has advised me to increase rent when a decade ago the same agent was advising me to hold it down: The effect of the Renters Rights Act is that you have to maximise rents and that’s the first lesson any regional government has to learn if it’s looking at any form of rent controls.

The Renters Rights Act is increasing rents and will continue to do so. But it isn’t the biggest problem out there. The biggest problem out there is a tax system that penalises small portfolio landlords and either drives them out of the market such that we end up with a market dominated by incorporated bodies, or forces them to drive up rents to cover additional tax levied on them because they cannot offset all their business costs. Tenants don’t benefit from this.

Reply to the comment left by Mark Pickersgill at 10:23
“I do absolutely agree with the observations that landlords who do the simple things well i.e. look after their properties and tenants, have nothing to fear from the new regulations.”
See if you still think that when you get a £7k fine for a simple clerical error; or when it takes more than 12 months to get a rent increase; or it takes 18 months to evict a non-paying tenant because of a combination of the new rules and overwhelmed courts; or when you use ground 1A to evict so that you can sell a property, but the market is saturated, it doesn’t sell and you can’t re-let for the next 12 months.

It seems that if s21 is issued within 2 months before RRA comes in and it expires after May 1st it is still legal and valid. My question is, if S21 expires before 1st May but legal proceedings run on after 1st May is it still legal too?

Reply to the comment left by LaLo at 11:58
Yes the proceedings would still be valid in that instance. Provided the notice was served prior to 1 May, you have until 31 July to start court proceedings. There is no limit on how long these may take once they’ve begun.

Reply to the comment left by DPT at 18/04/2026 – 13:40
Thanks for the information

As a landlord and a letting agent for the past 30yrs, I have found it’s often the small landlords who are the most ‘socially minded’, not putting up rents when they have good tenants or tenants who are under financial pressure. They often will house single mothers and vunerable tenants at a cost to themselves because they believe they are doing a social good. These are the landlords who have been squeezed out because of extra unecessary legislation and the many tax changes.

Reply to the comment left by Birminghamlandlord at 20/04/2026 – 08:27
As a small landlord this is exactly what I used to do. I didn’t use to care about whether tenants were on benefits as long as they paid me and as long as nobody could come and get the rent back off me if somebody discovered that they weren’t entitled to the benefits. I also used to house single mothers on benefits. I don’t do this any more and the reason I don’t do isn’t because I changed, it is because government policy changed.

Although I haven’t yet been squeezed out my behaviour has changed as a consequence of extra unnecessary legislation and tax changes. But it has also changed because my agent used to advice me to hold rents down a bit and now because of legislation my agent advises me to maximise the rent.

Government and tax policy is driving out competition and supply. It is restricting choice for tenants. This isn’t because there was necessarily a problem with the idea of a Rental Reform Bill that was fair to both landlord and tenant but because the final iteration of the Renters Rights Act was implemented under a majority left-wing government and when something like that happens the lunatic stuff creeps into the legislation. This doesn’t matter to the hard left wingers in the labour, green or SNP parties because for them market failure is success. But the people who really suffer for market failure are people like single mothers, vulnerable tenants, retired people who can’t pass credit-referencing. By undermining and destroying the market the left-wingers punish the very people for whom good governance, proportionate legislation and responsible government are supposed to be providing choice and the freedom to live as they need to live.

Renters rights is a joke