What the Renters' Rights Act changes about your listings
Most of what has been written about the Renters' Rights Act 2025 concerns tenancies: what replaces Section 21, and how possession works once it is gone. Very little of it concerns your website. That is odd, because the website is the one place where a mistake sits in public with a date on it, ready for anyone to screenshot.
The dates, and what each one asks of you
1 May 2026. The Act began phasing in on this date, which has passed. Two of its changes land on the advertising side of the business rather than the legal side. Section 21 "no fault" evictions are abolished. That quietly dates a lot of the landlord-facing copy sitting on agency websites. And inviting or accepting offers above the advertised rent becomes unlawful. Rent bidding is finished.
31 May 2026 — passed. Landlords were required to have given tenants a written Information Sheet by this date. The sheet has to reach the tenant. A folder marked "available on request" does not count. Failing to give it can bring a fine of up to £7,000. That is a serious number for a firm managing twenty units and a very bad month for one managing two hundred.
Late 2026. A Private Rented Sector database is expected. The final shape of it is not public yet, so there is nothing sensible to build for it today. Put it in the diary and leave it there.
One rent, one number
This is the change most likely to break something already sitting on your site.
If offers above the advertised rent are unlawful, then the advertised rent has to be the figure you are actually prepared to let at. It stops being a conversation starter and becomes a statement. That rules out habits that have been ordinary in lettings for twenty years:
- "Offers over £1,450 pcm"
- "£1,400 to £1,600 pcm depending on term and furnishing"
- A guide rent on the portal and a different, higher figure in the office
Moving the number off the page does not solve it either. "Rent on application" only shifts the same conversation to the phone, and it costs you every applicant who was not going to ring for a price.
The practical problem is rarely the policy. It is that most firms do not have one rent figure. They have four. There is the number in the website's property record, the number in the PDF brochure that was generated in March, the number in the window card, and the number the negotiator has in their head. When those four agree, nobody notices. When one of them is a range and another is firm, you now have a written inconsistency about a thing the law has an opinion on.
So the fix is boring and structural. One field, in one system, that every other place on the site reads from. The listing page, the search results, the featured-property block on the homepage and the downloadable particulars all pull the same value. Change it once and it changes everywhere. Nothing is left orphaned on a page you had forgotten was there.
Which only works if you can change it yourself. If amending a rent means emailing a developer and waiting three days, that has always been irritating; from May it becomes a live risk. We have written before about firms that cannot edit their own websites, and this is the year that particular problem stops being cosmetic.
Where the tenant-facing information lives
The Information Sheet duty belongs to the landlord or the agent. A page on a website does not discharge it, and anyone telling you a new site makes you compliant is selling you something that does not exist. What a website can do is make the obligation harder to forget and faster to meet.
In practice that means a small amount of unglamorous plumbing. Put the current version of the documents a tenant receives on one dated page, so nobody ever attaches last year's file. Give each listing a short "what happens next" section that tells the applicant, in plain words, what they will be sent and when. And keep your own record of what went out on what date, because if the question is ever asked you will want to point at a date rather than at somebody's memory.
If you have already done the material information work for the DMCC rules, this is the same muscle and much of the same content. We went through that in what the 2026 listing rules actually require.
What a website can do about it, and what it cannot
Say a two-bed goes live on the Monday at £1,395 pcm and four applicants have registered by the Wednesday. The old instinct is to go back to all four and see which of them moves. That instinct is now the thing to unlearn, and the figure published on your own site is the record of what you advertised.
A website can hold that figure in one place and publish it consistently. It can date-stamp what changed and when. It can put the tenant documents somewhere current and reachable, and it can push a reminder in front of whoever handles the paperwork.
It cannot send the Information Sheet, and it could not make anyone in the office send it before 31 May. No website saves a firm whose real problem is that nobody owns the task. Software makes good habits cheaper to keep. It does not supply the habit.
The work itself is not large. For most lettings firms it is a day or two: one rent field that every other page reads from, and a login that works for the person who has to change it.
If you would rather have this tidied up before May than during it, send us your web address and we will price the work. There is time to do it calmly, which is the cheapest way to do anything.