Lettings & Management in Stroud, Bristol and Gloucestershire

The Landlord Compliance Checklist

Before a tenant ever sets foot in your property there is a body of legal obligation that has to be satisfied, and the difficulty is that it has crept up year on year, so even experienced landlords sometimes carry gaps they do not know about. The core requirements look broadly like this:

• A valid gas safety certificate where there are gas appliances, renewed annually.
• An Electrical Installation Condition Report covering the fixed wiring.
• Working smoke alarms on every storey, and carbon monoxide alarms where required.
• A current Energy Performance Certificate you can lawfully let on.
• The deposit protected in an approved scheme within the statutory window, with the prescribed information served.
• The right-to-rent check completed before the tenancy begins.
• The required documents served at or before the start of the tenancy, including the government's How to Rent guide, the EPC and the gas certificate, with the timing and proof of service recorded.

Deposit protection is the one I would flag hardest, because the rules are unforgiving in a way that surprises people. A deposit has to be protected and the prescribed information served within the statutory window, and if it is not, you can face a financial penalty and, just as importantly, your ability to recover possession can be compromised. A lot of landlords took a deposit years ago, protected it once and never thought about it again, and that is precisely the situation that bites when circumstances change.

If you are an HMO landlord the picture is larger again, because licensing, room sizes, amenity standards and management regulations all layer on top, and the standards expected of an HMO are materially higher than for a single family let. It is always worth checking your local authority's licensing position for your particular property, because thresholds and additional licensing schemes vary from district to district.

Choosing and Referencing Tenants

If compliance is the foundation, tenant selection is the wall you build on it, and it is the part of the job where experience earns its keep. Proper referencing covers a few distinct checks:

• Verifying identity and confirming the right to rent in the UK.
• Checking affordability against the rent, usually as a multiple of income.
• Taking up a previous landlord reference.
• Looking at credit history for arrears, defaults or county court judgments.

None of those steps should be skipped to save a few days. A guarantor is the standard answer where an applicant is sound but does not quite meet the affordability threshold alone, for instance a student, someone recently self-employed or a tenant relocating for a new role, and it is a perfectly normal arrangement rather than a red flag.

What I would add, on the human side, is that the paperwork tells you whether someone can pay and says almost nothing about whether they will look after the place or be easy to deal with for the next couple of years. That judgement comes from the viewing, from how an applicant talks about why they are moving, and from the small inconsistencies you notice when you have sat across enough kitchen tables. The change in the law makes this judgement more consequential, because the days of relying on a no-fault notice to quietly part ways with a tenant who is not working out are gone, so the decision you make at referencing stage is one you may be living with for longer. Taking an extra week to get the right tenant is almost always cheaper than the wrong one in a hurry.

EPC and the Move to a Minimum of C

Energy efficiency is the area where I would ask landlords to plan ahead rather than react, and the position is now firmer than it was. Drawing on the government guidance on the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standard, the picture is:

• the current minimum for a rented home is EPC E under MEES
• from 1 October 2030 a minimum of EPC C will apply to all rented homes in England and Wales, confirmed by government on 21 January 2026
• there is a £10,000 cost cap on the improvement spend a landlord can be required to make
• penalties for breach are proposed to rise to up to £30,000 per property

The £10,000 cost cap is simply the most you can be required to spend bringing a property up to standard. If it still falls short after you have spent up to that, you can register an exemption rather than keep pouring money in, so the cap protects you as much as it pushes you.

I would add the honest caveat that Whitehall has pushed this kind of deadline back more than once, so nothing is ever wholly certain, but my steer is to plan for the 2030 standard to land rather than gamble on another delay. A useful starting point is the EPC document itself, because the report lists the recommended improvement measures and their indicative costs for your specific property. Know your current rating rather than assuming it, use those recommendations to see what would move it to a C and what that would cost, and plan the spend, since some measures are modest and some, particularly in older Cotswold stone properties, are not.

The Renters' Rights Act: What Landlords Need to Do

The biggest change in a generation took effect on 1 May 2026, when the Renters' Rights Act 2025 abolished Section 21 no-fault eviction in England. From that date existing assured shorthold tenancies converted to assured periodic tenancies, and Section 8, which requires you to rely on a specified legal ground, became the only route to possession. In plain terms, you can no longer ask a tenant to leave simply because a fixed term has ended or because you would prefer a different tenant, and any possession claim now has to rest on a recognised ground such as rent arrears, breach of tenancy or your own genuine need for the property.

For most good landlords with good tenants, day-to-day life does not feel very different, because nobody was using a no-fault notice to remove a tenant who was paying and behaving. Where it changes your thinking is at the edges and at the start, and there are a few practical responses worth making now:

• Treat tenant selection as higher-stakes, because your exit is narrower and more procedural than it was.
• Get your tenancy agreement, your record-keeping and your handling of arrears into good order, because if you ever do need to rely on a ground, the quality of your paperwork is what you will stand on.
• Consider rent and legal protection seriously, because the possession timeline has lengthened and the cover exists precisely for that risk.

If you have not had your approach reviewed since the Act came in, that is a conversation worth having.

How I Can Help

When you would rather not carry all of this yourself, lettings and management is the part I run directly through KW Move, day to day, to a proper systemised standard. There are three levels, let-only, rent collection and full management, with the fees explained clearly before you commit. Whichever you choose, the referencing, compliance, rent handling, maintenance and client accounting are run through established, regulated systems, with a professional inventory on every tenancy, so the compliance and the money are both handled correctly, every time.

The two protections worth understanding in their own right are below.

Rent and legal protection

This has become far more important since the law changed. With Section 21 abolished, recovering a property from a tenant who has stopped paying now means a court process that can take twelve months or more, and you carry the lost rent and the legal costs the whole time. Rent and legal protection insures against exactly that, covering up to fifteen months of rent and up to £100,000 of legal costs regardless of how long the process takes. For most managed properties I would treat it as one of the most cost-effective protections a landlord can hold, because a single bad tenancy without it can cost many times the premium.

Deposits: FlatFair or a traditional deposit

There are two ways to protect yourself on the deposit, and I will talk you through both. A traditional protected deposit is typically up to five weeks' rent, held in a government-approved scheme with the prescribed information served on time. FlatFair is a deposit alternative that gives you the equivalent of around ten weeks' cover, double the traditional protection, at no cost to you as the landlord, and it can make a property more attractive to good tenants because they are not tying up a large lump sum. For any tenant who passes referencing, FlatFair generally gives you more protection for nothing, so it is usually my recommendation, and where a tenant does not qualify we use a traditional deposit and protect it properly.

Let-Only or Full Management

The honest answer to the management question is that it depends on you rather than on the property. Let-only suits a landlord who lives near the property, has the time and temperament for tenant calls and contractor coordination, and is comfortable staying on top of an ever-shifting compliance regime themselves. Full management suits a landlord who is at a distance, time-poor, holds several properties, or would simply rather not be the person a tenant phones at the weekend.

A few things to weigh:

• Your distance from the property, since a leak two hours away is a very different problem from one ten minutes away.
• Your appetite for staying current on compliance, which, as the sections above show, is now a moving target rather than a one-off.
• The real cost of your own time, set against the management fee, rather than the fee in isolation.

With the law tightening and the paperwork carrying more weight than it did, the value of having someone keep the compliance side current has gone up, but plenty of hands-on landlords run let-only perfectly well, so it is genuinely a question of fit.

Adam's View

My settled view is that the landlords who do well are not the ones chasing the last fifty pounds of rent, they are the ones who treat the start of a tenancy as the moment that decides everything that follows. The regulation has become heavier and the law has just removed one of the safety valves landlords used to lean on, so the margin for a sloppy start has shrunk, and that is genuinely a reason to be more careful rather than to be put off. Done properly, with the right tenant, the right protection and the compliance kept current, a well-let property in this part of the world remains a sound, fairly low-drama asset, and most of the difficult stories I hear trace back to a corner cut at the beginning that looked harmless at the time.

Sources & Further Reading

• Private renting: landlord responsibilities (gov.uk)
• Guide to the Renters' Rights Act (gov.uk)
• How to Rent guide (gov.uk)
• Tenancy deposit protection (gov.uk)
• Right to rent checks (gov.uk)
• Gas safety for landlords (HSE)
• Electrical safety standards in the private rented sector (gov.uk)
• Minimum Energy Efficiency Standard: landlord guidance (gov.uk)
• HMO licence (gov.uk)
• National Residential Landlords Association (NRLA)