Professional agents are continuing to raise the bar at tenancy conclusion
May saw 1,968 tenancy conclusions processed through The Depositary, saving agents more than 4,000 working hours and removing around 31,000 days of waiting for landlords and tenants expecting funds. The latest Tenancy Conclusion Index suggests the gap between professionally managed tenancy conclusion and the wider market is becoming harder to ignore.
May saw 1,968 tenancy conclusions processed through The Depositary, saving agents more than 4,000 working hours and removing around 31,000 days of waiting for landlords and tenants expecting funds.
That is the headline from this month’s Tenancy Conclusion Index, but it also points to something bigger. Tenancy conclusion remains one of the least benchmarked parts of the lettings process, despite being one of the moments that matters most. It affects landlord confidence, shapes resident experience and often leaves the strongest lasting impression of how professionally a tenancy has been handled.
The wider market still shows how inconsistent that experience can be. Nationwide research found that tenants renting from a private landlord waited almost two months on average for their deposit to be returned. That helps underline the difference between a professionally managed tenancy conclusion and the slower, more variable experience that can still exist elsewhere, particularly in self-managed property.
What the May data shows, once again, is that some of the strongest agents in the market are continuing to prove what good looks like in practice.
The first edition of the Tenancy Conclusion Index, covering March and April, suggested that some agents were already delivering tenancy conclusions at a speed and standard well beyond what much of the sector has historically accepted as normal.
May builds on that picture.
What stands out is not simply isolated excellence, but repeatable excellence. Across agencies of different sizes and in different parts of the country, strong operators are combining fast conclusion times with strong landlord outcomes. That matters because speed on its own is not enough. Speed with evidence, fairness and control is where real operational quality starts to show.
The clearest message from May is that high performance at tenancy conclusion is no longer isolated to one branch, one business model or one standout individual. It is showing up across larger groups, regional operators and independents alike.
At LRG, that strength is visible at scale. In May, 113 team members reconciled in an average of 10 days or less, with another 66 averaging 15 days or less. More than two-thirds of the team secured at least 90% of proposed claims, including 94 users who achieved a perfect 100%.
Elsewhere, several agencies combined impressive speed with equally strong landlord outcomes. At National Home Move, the Hemel Hempstead branch averaged return times of just seven days, while every branch and every user secured 100% of proposed tenant liabilities in May. At Charters, one user averaged five days, another 7.5 days, and the business averaged 13 days overall, while still securing 87% of claimed deductions, with nearly 60% of the team recording a perfect 100% average.
A similar pattern of strong, consistent execution could be seen elsewhere. At Haslams, a third of the team reconciled in 10 days or less. At Paramount Properties and Jones Robinson Group, around 40% of the team secured 100% of claims, while 70% achieved 90% or more. Chase Buchanan delivered one of the month’s strongest landlord-outcome stories, securing an average of 94.6% of proposed dilapidations, with nearly 85% of the team at 100%. Brinkleys, meanwhile, achieved what can only really be described as a perfect month, securing 100% of proposed tenant liabilities and dilapidations on behalf of landlords. And at Maxine Lester Lettings & Property Management, one of the UK’s top performers averaged returns in just eight days, while the whole team averaged at or above 90% secured for landlords.
Taken together, those results show something more important than a handful of good internal stats. They suggest that the strongest agents are building repeatable, evidence-led processes that deliver speed, control and commercially meaningful outcomes for landlords.
The broader significance of May’s data lies in consistency. In the first edition of the Index, the story was that some agencies were already challenging long-held assumptions about what is realistic at the end of a tenancy. The May figures strengthen that argument. These are not just one-off standout results; they increasingly look like evidence of embedded operational quality.
That matters because tenancy conclusion is still too often treated as an administrative close-out, when in reality it is one of the clearest tests of how well an agency gathers evidence, communicates expectations and protects its client’s position. For landlords, it is a moment of truth. For tenants, it often shapes their final impression of the tenancy experience.
In a more demanding market, that has growing commercial significance. Landlords are scrutinising value more closely, residents expect greater transparency and speed, and agencies that can show measurable service outcomes are in a much stronger position than those still relying on broad claims about professionalism.
A secondary trend remains worth keeping an eye on. In earlier editions of the Index, cases involving deposit alternative products accounted for a disproportionately high share of disputes relative to their share of concluded tenancy cases. That remains something to monitor, although it sits behind the main story this month. The bigger picture in May is the increasingly visible difference between professionally managed tenancy conclusion and the slower, less consistent outcomes still seen elsewhere in the market.
The value of better tenancy conclusion is not just visible in speed, deductions or dispute outcomes. It is also visible in the time returned to agency teams, and in the time no longer lost by landlords and tenants waiting for funds.
In May alone, the 1,968 tenancy conclusions processed through The Depositary saved agents more than 4,000 working hours and removed around 31,000 days of waiting for landlords and tenants awaiting their money. Using a typical full-time working year of 1,750 hours, that is the equivalent of around 2.3 full-time working years returned to agency operations in a single month. At an average property manager cost of £22.43 per hour, it also represents almost £90,000 of equivalent staffing time.
There is an even more striking way to look at that impact. Using Nationwide’s finding that tenants renting from a private landlord waited almost two months on average for their deposit to be returned, a 45-day differential provides a useful comparison against the self-managed market. On that basis, the 1,968 tenancy conclusions processed through The Depositary in May equate to around 88,560 days of waiting removed — roughly 243 years of waiting erased in a single month.
Across 86,168 tenancy conclusions to date, the cumulative picture is even stronger. The Depositary has saved agents more than 175,000 working hours, the equivalent of 100 full-time working years, and removed over 1.3 million days of waiting for landlords and tenants. That amounts to more than 3,500 years of waiting time erased. Using the same 45-day self-managed market comparison, the platform’s total volume to date equates to around 3.88 million days of waiting avoided, or more than 10,600 years of waiting removed.
Those figures matter because they put operational improvement into terms the market can immediately understand. This is not just about digitising one process or shaving time off an internal workflow. It is about releasing capacity back into agency businesses, reducing friction at a critical stage of the tenancy journey and helping money reach the people waiting for it sooner. In practice, those freed-up hours can be reinvested into the work agencies most want their teams focused on: winning instructions, improving compliance, progressing renewals, supporting landlords and strengthening service consistency across branches and portfolios.
If the first Tenancy Conclusion Index suggested that some of the best operators were beginning to challenge old assumptions about what good looks like, the May edition suggests that this is becoming more durable than a run of isolated strong results. Once performance becomes measurable, it becomes harder to dismiss. Once it becomes repeatable, it starts to point to a genuine shift in standards.
That is why tenancy conclusion deserves more attention than it has historically received. It sits at the intersection of operational efficiency, landlord service, resident experience and reputational trust. The agencies performing most strongly in this month’s Index are not simply processing tenancies more quickly; they are demonstrating that the end of a tenancy can be handled with greater clarity, consistency and control than the wider market has often accepted as normal.
As more data builds over the coming months, that gap between average practice and best-in-class delivery is likely to become clearer still.
