I've always considered myself reasonably well informed when it comes to lettings legislation. I run a London agency, I run a PropTech business, I spend an arguably unhealthy amount of time talking to people about the future of our industry, and I make a conscious effort to understand what's coming rather than waiting for it to land on my desk. Between industry meetings, conversations with policymakers and the day-to-day reality of managing properties, I'd like to think I've got a reasonably firm grasp of the challenges facing letting agents.
So it takes quite a lot for someone to make me question whether the way we currently operate is going to remain viable. Paul Conway of Yuno managed it in about an hour, and I came away from our conversation with a rather uncomfortable thought about the future of independent lettings businesses.
I've known Paul for several years. I understood that his business operated in the property licensing and compliance space, and I had a fairly good idea of the problem it was trying to solve. What I hadn't appreciated was just how far that problem had evolved, or how much of the operational burden facing letting agents sits beyond the obvious question of whether a property needs a licence. We sat down for a demonstration before recording our Viking Chats conversation, and it genuinely challenged some of my assumptions.
I think we're approaching a point where even very good independent letting agents will struggle to manage the full complexity of property compliance manually. That's a significant admission from someone who has spent years building a business around knowledgeable people, good training and carefully considered processes, but the more I look at the direction our industry is heading, the harder it becomes to argue otherwise.
Eight Boroughs, Eight Different Headaches
At Base, we manage a relatively modest portfolio compared with some of the national operators, but our properties are spread across eight London boroughs. That geographical spread creates a disproportionate amount of work, because each borough can have its own licensing schemes, boundaries, application requirements, fees, conditions and administrative peculiarities. Some properties fall under mandatory HMO licensing, others may be affected by additional or selective licensing, and the rules can change depending on the property, its occupation and its precise location.
A landlord with two apparently similar properties a few streets apart can face very different obligations simply because one sits on the other side of a council boundary. It's a situation that makes little sense from the perspective of someone trying to manage a portfolio efficiently, but it's an everyday reality for agents working across London. And that's before we start thinking about changes to the schemes themselves.
One of the things that really struck me during Paul's demonstration was the importance of tracking those changes. A council introduces a new scheme, extends an existing one, alters a boundary or changes a requirement. The information might be published somewhere on its website, but that doesn't necessarily mean every affected landlord or agent receives a helpful notification. It's remarkably easy to imagine a competent property manager, diligently doing their job, missing something that has changed quietly in the background.
Multiply that possibility across hundreds of properties, numerous local authorities and several different categories of obligation, and the scale of the challenge becomes obvious. The problem isn't necessarily that somebody has failed to do their job or neglected their training. It's that we're increasingly asking people to perform a job that depends on monitoring an enormous number of moving parts, often without the systems needed to keep those moving parts properly connected.
The Industry Has Relied on Knowledgeable People for Too Long
Historically, a good lettings business could manage most of its compliance obligations through a combination of experienced staff, training, checklists, diary reminders and decent record keeping. That approach wasn't perfect, but it was workable for businesses with the right culture and people. A knowledgeable property manager understood the key requirements, knew when certificates needed renewing, recognised when a property might need a licence and could usually identify when something required specialist advice.
The difficulty is that every additional obligation adds another layer to an already complicated system. We've got changes associated with the Renters' Rights Act, the planned extension of housing standards into the private rented sector, evolving expectations around energy efficiency, and increasing attention on property condition and safety. These changes don't all arrive at once, and their precise requirements and commencement dates matter, but the broader direction is difficult to dispute. The regulatory responsibilities attached to managing residential property are becoming more extensive.
Crucially, they also overlap, which creates a different type of challenge from simply remembering to renew a certificate. A particular property might have licensing conditions that interact with fire safety requirements, property standards, occupancy arrangements and other obligations. Understanding one requirement in isolation doesn't necessarily tell you everything you need to know about the property, particularly when local variations and future changes are added to the equation.
It requires someone to understand which rules apply, how they interact, when they change and what action is needed. Then they have to make sure that action actually happens, often involving several people, different contractors and a landlord who may be understandably reluctant to authorise another expense. The knowledge is important, but the work involved in turning that knowledge into a properly managed process is becoming just as significant.
Being Compliant and Managing Compliance Are Different Things
When we talk about compliance, we tend to focus on whether the property meets the relevant requirements. That's obviously important, but it overlooks the enormous amount of work required to establish and maintain that position. Somebody has to identify the obligation, confirm that it applies, explain it to the landlord, obtain authorisation where necessary, organise the relevant work, collect the evidence and make sure the records are accurate.
They also need to know when the requirement changes or needs reviewing, and whether a decision made several years ago is still appropriate under the current rules. Now imagine doing that across a portfolio where every property has a slightly different combination of obligations. The administrative burden becomes substantial long before anyone has actually carried out a repair, installed a fire door or submitted a licence application.
We have property managers spending valuable time checking information, moving between systems, updating spreadsheets, chasing documents and trying to establish what needs attention next. These are intelligent, experienced people whose real value lies in solving problems, managing relationships and making sound decisions. Yet an extraordinary amount of their working day can disappear into simply establishing which task they should be doing, which strikes me as a rather expensive way to run a business.
There's also an issue of consistency. When a process depends heavily on an individual remembering to check something, knowing where to find the information or recognising an unusual situation, the quality of the outcome can vary depending on who's handling it. Even excellent teams experience staff turnover, sickness, holidays and periods of unusually high demand, and a resilient business needs to function properly through all of those circumstances.
The Small Agency Has a Particular Problem
Large operators aren't immune to any of this. In fact, with thousands of properties, their exposure can be considerable, and a small error repeated across a substantial portfolio can become a very expensive mistake. But scale gives them options that simply aren't available to most independent agencies.
A national agency might have a dedicated compliance department, in-house legal support, specialist technical staff and the resources to invest in sophisticated systems. It can spread those costs across a substantial portfolio and develop procedures that are maintained by people whose entire working lives revolve around particular areas of regulation.
An independent agency managing a few hundred properties has a much harder calculation to make. You still need to understand the same legislation, meet the same relevant obligations and access qualified contractors and specialists when something falls outside your team's expertise. But you don't have thousands of management fees over which to distribute those costs, and employing a dedicated specialist for every technical discipline simply isn't realistic.
The same challenge applies to resolving problems. A business needing hundreds of compliant fire doors installed has a very different relationship with potential contractors from an agency that needs one. Neither business can afford to get the work wrong, but the smaller operator may spend a disproportionate amount of time finding the right person, establishing their credentials and arranging a relatively modest piece of work.
For years, smaller agencies have been able to compete with larger businesses by being more knowledgeable, more responsive and more personal. Those advantages remain valuable, and I certainly wouldn't swap the flexibility of an independent business for layers of corporate bureaucracy. But those strengths don't automatically compensate for an expanding administrative workload, particularly when the need to preserve that personal service makes it even more important to stop wasting skilled people's time.
Training Matters, but Training Alone Won't Solve This
I am a huge advocate of better training in estate agency. Frankly, our industry has never been particularly consistent at it, and there are still people managing properties who don't have the technical knowledge their responsibilities demand. That needs to improve, particularly as the consequences of getting things wrong become more significant.
But there's a limit to what we can reasonably expect an individual property manager to know. Paul made an interesting point during our conversation about the word expert, because property licensing, planning, fire safety and building safety are all specialist disciplines. People spend entire careers developing expertise in individual areas, and expecting a generalist property manager to possess the same depth of knowledge across all of them is unrealistic.
We should absolutely train people to understand the fundamentals, recognise risks, ask sensible questions and communicate confidently with landlords. We should also give them access to reliable specialist information and appropriate professional support, rather than expecting them to become walking encyclopaedias of every local authority requirement and technical standard.
A system that identifies a requirement doesn't absolve the property manager of responsibility for understanding what they're communicating. Equally, an excellent property manager shouldn't have to spend hours researching a technical issue when a properly maintained specialist resource could help establish the answer far more efficiently. The objective should be to equip good people to make better decisions, with less wasted effort and a lower chance of something important being overlooked.
Compliance Should Be Built Into the Operation
One of the reasons I found Paul's approach interesting was that it made me reconsider where compliance should sit within an agency's operating model. Too often, we treat it as a collection of separate tasks, each with its own reminders, documents and people responsible. There's the gas safety process, the electrical safety process, the licensing process, the inspection process and a growing list of other procedures that need to be maintained.
Over time, those processes become a patchwork. Some sit inside the CRM, while others live in spreadsheets, email inboxes, shared drives or, occasionally, someone's head. It can all work reasonably well until somebody leaves, a process changes or a requirement appears that doesn't fit neatly into the existing arrangements, at which point the weaknesses become apparent.
A better approach is to think of compliance as part of the underlying infrastructure of the business. For each property, the agency should be able to establish what obligations apply, what evidence is held, what action is outstanding, who is responsible and what happens next. That information needs to be accessible to the people doing the work, without requiring them to reconstruct the answer from half a dozen sources.
Ideally, the system should also help translate that information into action. If a particular requirement needs attention, the relevant property manager should know what needs doing, why it matters and what information the landlord needs to make a decision. The more of that preparation we can handle systematically, the more time we preserve for the work that genuinely requires human judgement.
The Real Test Is Whether the Problem Gets Fixed
There's another trap here, particularly as compliance technology becomes more sophisticated. Identifying risks is useful, and producing an impressive report showing every outstanding issue across a portfolio is useful too. But if all we've done is hand a property manager a list of 400 problems, we haven't necessarily made their life much easier, even if we've dramatically improved their awareness of the work waiting for them.
The real operational value comes from helping those problems reach a proper resolution. That might involve arranging an appropriate specialist, obtaining quotations, securing landlord approval, tracking completion and ensuring the necessary evidence is recorded. Some of those steps can be automated or simplified, while others require professional judgement, negotiation or technical expertise.
This matters because agencies don't get paid simply to know that something is wrong. They're expected to help landlords deal with it, and identifying an obligation without a practical route towards meeting it can leave everyone in a rather uncomfortable position. If we want technology to transform property management, it has to support that practical reality rather than simply producing more sophisticated lists of things that need doing.
We Need to Change the Economics of Doing the Right Thing
There's a slightly uncomfortable commercial question underneath all of this. Can agencies continue to absorb an expanding compliance workload without changing how they operate or what they charge? I struggle to see how, particularly when margins are already under pressure, staffing is expensive, good people are difficult to recruit and landlords are understandably sensitive to increases in management fees.
We can try to recover those costs by increasing fees, and in some circumstances that may be entirely justified. But there are limits to how much additional expenditure landlords will accept, particularly when they're facing their own rising costs. The other option is to reduce the cost of delivering the service by removing unnecessary manual work and making the processes themselves more efficient.
That's where technology has a much bigger role to play than simply making existing administrative tasks slightly quicker. If we can remove unnecessary monitoring, reduce duplication, make specialist knowledge more accessible and create more reliable processes, we can improve the economics of compliance without compromising standards. That benefits agencies, landlords and tenants, while creating an opportunity for smaller businesses to remain competitive without building the same internal departments as a national operator.
The Tipping Point Is Closer Than We Think
I don't believe every letting agent needs to rush out tomorrow and replace all their systems, nor do I think technology is some magical solution that removes the need for competent people, proper training or professional accountability. But I do think we need to be much more honest about the limitations of our existing operating models, particularly when the regulatory environment is becoming more demanding rather than less.
The industry has spent years responding to additional regulation by adding another checklist, another reminder, another training session and another responsibility to an already busy property manager. That approach has allowed businesses to adapt incrementally, but every additional layer makes the overall operation more complicated and increases the amount of coordination needed to keep everything functioning.
For me, the conversation with Paul was interesting precisely because it challenged an assumption I'd been comfortable with. I believed a well-run independent agency could continue to manage this complexity largely through good people and disciplined processes. I'm no longer convinced that's enough on its own, especially when the volume of information that needs monitoring is growing faster than most businesses can reasonably expand their teams.
We need good people, absolutely, and we need training, sound judgement and genuine accountability. But we increasingly need systems capable of supporting those people through a regulatory landscape that is simply too complicated to manage efficiently from memory, spreadsheets and scattered reminders.
The agencies that recognise this early will have an advantage. They'll be able to spend less time navigating administrative complexity and more time delivering the service their clients actually value, while those that don't may find themselves employing increasingly expensive teams simply to stand still. Given everything else facing our industry, that seems like a particularly poor use of everyone's time.
