Landlord database: think twice before registering your properties early

Registering early may sound sensible, but under Regulation 10 of the draft rules, your first property could determine the annual renewal date for later properties in your portfolio.

Property118 readers will already know that landlords will be able to register properties before their regional deadline.

Getting it done early might sound like the sensible approach.

But before you do, look at Regulation 10.

Under the draft Private Rented Sector Database Regulations 2026, once a landlord has an active dwelling entry, properties registered later take the same annual renewal date as the existing active dwelling entry or entries.

Your later properties may not get 12 months

Suppose you register your first properties on 15th December 2026 and another property in August 2027. You might expect the August property to renew in August 2028.

It won’t. If the December entries are still active, Regulation 10 brings the later property onto their existing renewal date. Its first registration period could therefore be only a few months.

For a landlord with twenty or fifty properties, that could eventually mean the portfolio’s dwelling entries sharing one annual renewal date.

So, spreading registrations across the year does not necessarily spread the annual renewal workload.

Think before going early

The government is deliberately staggering the database rollout across England, beginning with the West Midlands on 15th December 2026 and reaching London on 15th July 2027 and the Southwest on 15th August.

Portfolio landlords therefore need to think about more than their initial registration deadline.

The date you start registering could determine when much of your annual database renewal work falls in future years.

That might be convenient. But December, for example, may be exactly the wrong time for some landlords or agents to deal with an entire portfolio.

And what about the £65.00 fee per property?

There is another question that needs clarification.

The government has announced an annual £65.00 property fee. But suppose you register another property in August and Regulation 10 brings its first renewal forward to December.

What do you pay in August, and what becomes payable again in December?

The draft Regulations require fees for making and renewing dwelling entries but do not themselves provide a simple £65.00 pro-rating formula for this situation. The government has indicated that fees will be adjusted during rollout, but exactly how this scenario will work needs clarification.

The Regulations are still draft, so the final wording needs to be checked.

But if Regulation 10 survives unchanged, the message is simple: Don’t register early simply because you can. First decide when you want your portfolio’s annual renewal workload to fall.

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.