Does the letting agent or the landlord register the property on the PRS Database?

The legal duty sits with the landlord, but in practice most managed-portfolio agents are doing it for them. The database is keyed to the landlord's identity, so you log in as their authorised representative, upload the gas safety, EICR, EPC, alarm evidence, and any licences, and add the registration reference to the file. Whatever you decide, agree it in writing with each landlord client and record who owns the task — the worst outcome is both of you assuming the other did it and a property going un-registered.

What happens to Section 21 notices that were served before 1 May 2026?

A Section 21 notice that was validly served before commencement remains valid and can be relied on for possession proceedings already in train, subject to the existing transitional rules and time limits. Anything served on or after 1 May is invalid. The fastest source of office-wide error in the first month will be a colleague drafting from an old template — pull every saved Section 21 notice template out of your document system today.

Can a letting agent be fined directly under the Renters' Rights Act?

Yes. Civil penalties under the Act can be issued against a person who acts in the course of a business of letting or managing property — that explicitly includes agents. Penalties run up to £40,000 for serious breaches and can be issued in addition to any penalty against the landlord. Agents can also be subject to banning orders preventing involvement in lettings for up to five years.

Do letting agents still need Property Redress Scheme membership now that the new Ombudsman is live?

Yes. The existing letting agent redress requirement (TPO or PRS) is separate from the new Private Rented Sector Ombudsman, which is a landlord-facing scheme. Letting agents need both: redress scheme membership for their own conduct as agents, and a process for handling complaints that flow through the landlord's Ombudsman membership. Display both sets of details in your client agreements and tenancy paperwork.

How should letting agents handle the bidding ban when a landlord asks for offers above the asking rent?

You cannot accept a rent above the advertised figure, regardless of what the landlord requests. The duty is on the person marketing the property — that is the agent. If the landlord wants more, you withdraw the listing, re-advertise at the higher rent, and start again. Document the conversation in writing so the audit trail is clear if Trading Standards asks why a property was relisted.

What does Awaab's Law mean for a letting agent's repairs workflow?

Hazard reports now have statutory clocks attached. Emergency hazards must be made safe within 24 hours, significant hazards investigated within 14 days, and a written report issued to the tenant at each stage. Your repairs workflow needs three things it probably did not have before commencement: a timestamped log of when each report was received, a documented inspection record, and a written notification to the tenant. Without those three artefacts the landlord cannot prove compliance, and the agent's process is what generated — or failed to generate — the evidence.

The Renters' Rights Act Is Live: A Letting Agent's Day-One Operations Checklist

The short version

The Renters' Rights Act commenced today. Every tenancy you grant from this morning is a new-style periodic assured tenancy, every Section 21 template in your document system is now obsolete, and every property you market needs to be on the Private Rented Sector Database. The penalties are live too — civil fines up to £40,000, rent repayment orders covering up to 24 months, and banning orders preventing you from letting for up to five years.

If you are a letting agent, this is not a legislative change you read about. It is an operational change that touches every file in your office. This guide is the day-one checklist: what to update in your templates and CRM today, what to say to your landlord clients this week, and where the highest-risk mistakes will be in the first month.

For the landlord-facing version of the same regulation, see our Renters' Rights Act compliance checklist for landlords. This article focuses on what changes for the agency itself.

What changed in agent-operations terms

You can summarise the Act in legal language, but it is more useful to summarise what changes inside the office:

Every tenancy you grant from today is periodic. No fixed terms. The rent and notice provisions in your standard agreement need to reflect that.
Every notice template needs a fresh review. Section 21 is gone. Section 8 has new and amended grounds. Section 13 is now the only valid route to a rent increase.
Every property file needs a database registration reference. Without it, you cannot market the property, serve a notice, or rely on most Section 8 grounds.
Every repair report has a statutory clock attached. Emergency hazards must be made safe within 24 hours, significant hazards investigated within 14 days.
Every listing is subject to the bidding ban. You advertise a fixed rent and you cannot accept offers above it.
Every tenancy application is subject to the new discrimination rules. Blanket bans on children, benefits recipients, or pets are no longer lawful.

Each of these changes a workflow that someone in the office runs every day. Together they are why this commencement is harder for letting agents than it is for landlords — landlords have one or two properties to think about, you have a portfolio of files, templates, and processes that all moved at the same time.

The day-one office audit

Before you do anything else today, run through this list.

1. Pull every Section 21 template out of your document system

Search your document storage for "Section 21", "Form 6A", "no fault", and any custom names your office uses. Move every template to an archive folder, rename it with a "(PRE-1-MAY-2026 — DO NOT USE)" prefix, or delete it outright. Section 21 is the single highest-probability mistake in week one because the template is muscle memory.

2. Audit your tenancy agreement template

The standard AST template you used last week is no longer valid for new lets. Your new template needs to:

Be a periodic assured tenancy from day one (no fixed term clause)
Remove any Section 21 notice provisions
Update the rent review mechanism to match the annual cap and Section 13 requirement
Remove any blanket bans on pets, children, or tenants in receipt of benefits
Include the landlord's Ombudsman membership reference
Include the database registration reference
Include your own redress scheme membership details

If you use a template from a property body or law firm, check the version date — anything dated before April 2026 is suspect.

3. Update your Section 8 notice templates

The grounds for possession have been expanded and reworded. The notice form itself has been updated. Your office probably has six or seven Section 8 templates for different grounds — each one needs a refresh against the post-commencement version. Mandatory grounds, discretionary grounds, and the new sale and family-occupation grounds all have different evidence requirements.

4. Update your marketing copy and listing process

Run a quick check across your portal listings:

Is every advert showing a single fixed rent, not a range and not "offers over"?
Have you removed any "no DSS", "no children", or "no pets" wording?
Is your application form free of questions that would amount to a blanket ban?
Does your referencing criteria allow a tenant to bring a guarantor instead of being refused outright?

The duty to advertise a fixed rent and to avoid discriminatory marketing sits on the agent, not the landlord. You are the one who pays the penalty if a Trading Standards officer pulls up a listing.

5. Diarise the database registration for every managed property

For every property you manage, decide today: is the agent registering on behalf of the landlord, or is the landlord doing it themselves? Whatever the answer, record it in the file. Then build a target date for completion of every registration in the next 30 days. Every property without a registration reference is a property you cannot lawfully market.

6. Review your repairs workflow against Awaab's Law

If a tenant emails to report damp at 4pm on a Friday, what happens next? Walk it through:

Who reads the email and timestamps it?
Who decides whether it is an emergency hazard (24-hour clock) or a significant hazard (14-day clock)?
Who sends the written acknowledgement to the tenant?
Who instructs the contractor and records the inspection?
Who issues the written report to the tenant once the work is done?

If any of those steps does not have an owner and a documented record, the agency is the weak link in the landlord's compliance chain.

7. Brief every member of staff today

The biggest risk in the first month is a well-meaning negotiator or property manager doing what they did last week. A 15-minute team huddle covering — Section 21 is dead, listings must show a fixed rent, every hazard report has a clock — will prevent more breaches than any policy document. Follow it up by email so there is a written record of the brief.

Updating the landlord conversation

The first email you send to every landlord client this week should cover four points:

1The Act has commenced. Their property cannot lawfully be let unless it is on the database.
2Who is registering. Whether you are doing it on their behalf as part of the management service, or whether they need to register themselves and send you the reference.
3What changes for them. Periodic tenancies, no Section 21, annual rent reviews via Section 13, Decent Homes Standard inspections, Awaab's Law clocks on repairs.
4What it changes for you. If your management agreement needs updating to reflect new responsibilities — database administration, Ombudsman complaint handling, hazard logging — say so.

This is also the right moment to revisit your fees. Several agencies are introducing a one-off database registration fee per property, and an annual database maintenance line in their management fee. Whether you do or not, do not let the work go in unpriced — administering 80 database records and responding to Ombudsman complaints across a portfolio is a real operational cost.

Where the highest-risk mistakes will be

Based on how similar regimes have played out and how the Act is drafted, the highest-probability breaches in the first 60 days will be:

1A colleague drafting a Section 21 notice from an old template. Pull every template today.
2A property going on the market before its database registration is live. Block listings at the workflow level if no reference is on file.
3A listing accepting an offer above the asking rent. The negotiator does not realise this is a breach. Brief everyone today.
4A blanket "no DSS" or "no pets" line surviving in a property advert. Do a portal-wide sweep.
5A damp report sitting in an inbox over a weekend without an Awaab's Law timestamp. Build inbox triage into the repairs process.
6An informal rent increase agreed by email and not served via Section 13. Cancel any planned uplifts that were not paperworked.
7A managed property where neither the agent nor the landlord registered on the database because each assumed the other was doing it.

Each of these is avoidable by pre-empting it as a process change today, rather than fixing it after a Trading Standards letter arrives.

What this means for tracking compliance across the office

Under the old regime, agency compliance tracking was about a handful of certificates and a few key dates. Under the new regime, every property file accumulates additional artefacts:

Database registration reference and renewal date
Ombudsman membership reference (landlord) and redress scheme reference (agent)
Decent Homes Standard inspection record
A repairs log with timestamped Awaab's Law deadlines
A Section 13 history showing the date of the last rent increase
An updated tenancy agreement keyed to the post-commencement template

Holding the certificates is no longer enough. The evidence has to be retrievable on demand — when a council inspector visits, when the Ombudsman opens a complaint, when a tenant applies for a rent repayment order, or when a court asks why a Section 8 ground should succeed.

This is the operational reason a dedicated compliance system is no longer optional for an agency of any size. Proplio tracks every certificate and every deadline across your managed portfolio, gives you a colour-coded dashboard of compliance status for every property, and sends automatic email reminders at 90, 60, 30, 14, and 7 days before anything expires. When a council, a tenant, or the Ombudsman asks for proof, the audit pack is one click away.

For more on the move from spreadsheets to dedicated tracking, see our guide on letting agent compliance software vs spreadsheet and our roundup of the best compliance tracking software for letting agents.

Where penalties land — landlord, agent, or both

A common misconception is that the agent's exposure under the Act is limited because the landlord holds the legal interest in the property. That is not how the Act is drafted. Civil penalties can be issued against a person who acts in the course of a business of letting or managing property, which captures agents directly. In practice, in the first wave of enforcement, expect:

Database registration breaches: primarily on the landlord, but agents who handled the marketing of an unregistered property may be penalised too.
Bidding ban breaches: primarily on the agent, because the duty attaches to the person marketing the property.
Discriminatory marketing or referencing: primarily on the agent, for the same reason.
Awaab's Law breaches: primarily on the landlord, but if the failure was caused by the agent's process, there is a real risk of secondary liability and a real certainty of being sued by the landlord under the management agreement.
Section 21 served in error: primarily on the agent in practice, because the agent drafted the notice. The landlord is the one who suffers the consequences (lost possession claim) but the cost of putting it right falls on the agency.

The point is not to alarm. The point is that the operational risk has shifted toward the agent, and the audit trail your office generates is now part of the landlord's defence — and your own.

Key takeaways

Today is commencement day. Every Section 21 template is obsolete and every new tenancy is periodic.
Pull old templates out of your document system this morning. Section 21, AST, Section 8 with old wording, marketing copy with blanket bans.
Decide who registers each managed property on the database — agent or landlord — and record it in the file.
Brief every member of staff today. Most early breaches will be muscle-memory mistakes.
Build Awaab's Law clocks into your repairs workflow with timestamped logs and written reports to the tenant.
Listings advertise a fixed rent. No bidding, no offers above asking, no exceptions.
Penalties can be issued against agents directly — up to £40,000 plus banning orders.
The audit trail your office generates is now part of the landlord's defence as well as your own. Every record you keep reduces the risk for both sides.

This article is for general guidance and applies to England. Regulations differ in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and individual provisions of the Act may have separate commencement dates or transitional rules. Always check the current position with a qualified adviser before serving a notice or relying on a possession ground.