The Renters' Rights Act is a record-keeping problem

What changes, operationally

Tenancies go periodic and section 21 goes away, so ending a tenancy means evidencing a specific ground, with the burden on you to show it. Rent increases follow a set process a tenant can challenge. Damp and mould complaints acquire response deadlines with teeth. And landlords and properties get registered on a national database. None of this is exotic; all of it assumes you can produce a dated, complete history of any tenancy on demand.

The gap in most agencies

An agent with three hundred tenancies has a lettings system that logs some of this, an inbox that holds the rest, and a filing habit somewhere in between. Today, when a possession case or a deposit dispute needs a timeline, somebody reconstructs it from emails, and it takes a day. Under the new rules that day's work becomes routine, and "we can't find the notice" becomes a lost case rather than an annoyance.

The fix is duller than new software

Whichever lettings package you run almost certainly has an export or an API. We wire it into a screen the office actually watches: repair jobs against their clocks, rent increase notices and their dates, certificates due, tenancies missing documents. Where the history lives in inboxes, a small connection files it against the tenancy automatically. No one re-keys anything and no one migrates systems in the middle of a rule change.