Are landlords getting the measure of their letting agents wrong? 

Do landlords have the whole story when they discuss the merits of their letting agents?

Tom Entwistle, LandlordZONE founder.

Ask most landlords what makes a good letting agent, and they will answer quickly. The rent comes in on time, the property stays let, repairs get sorted, and the fee feels reasonable. 

Those are sensible things to acknowledge, but according to Stephen Marr, co-founder and commercial director of Nestsen, a UK maintenance-operations software platform, it's only half the story.

I’ve been letting property since the late 1980s, using agents in the past, seen several changes of legislative and management structure, and more recently as someone who writes a good deal of material on the property industry, even more change. 

One piece that landed on my desk recently, from Stephen Marr, co-founder of the maintenance-technology platform Nestsen, made a lot of sense and a point worth noting. These things landlords use to judge an agent are almost all outcomes. They say very little about the people, training, knowledge and experience and processes that produced them.

The obvious measures are easy to check

Occupancy, rent collected, fees charged, repairs actioned. Landlords will always look to these measures because they’re visible and comparable and what they want. You can easily compare two agents’ numbers side by side, but what you can’t easily see is what each agent actually did to get there. And that’s the point, this is where the real difference in service quality exists.

A landlord who receives rent on time and hears from their agent only occasionally might reasonably conclude the property needs very little looking after. Behind that quiet zone, though, lies an agent who may have spoken to the tenant, chased a contractor, checked on an outstanding repair, updated the file, followed up on completion and kept a close eye on compliance dates.

None of these actions came through in a detailed email, because none of it went wrong, and they were done to safeguard your own interests. Strip that work behind the scenes and you and your agent may get away with it in the short-term, but eventually the skimping on the essentials shows up. It shows up in the form of problems that should have been caught earlier.

Effective property management, like all good management practice, is not about fixing everything once they’ve gone wrong. It’s about anticipating issues before they become serious, and having the skills and knowledge to deal with those issues that do get through the net. 

All that’s difficult to measure from the landlord’s side unless the agent decides to communicate the level of detail that few landlords would wish to know, which is presumably why so few agents do it.

The gap between tenant-reported issues and those that are quietly resolved is where the real agents’ service actually happens. Maintenance issues illustrate this very well. From the landlord’s position the obvious yardstick is cost, plus the lack of ongoing complaints where they themselves get involved. A tenant reports a leaking tap and an overflowing shower tray, and it gets fixed. An invoice arrives within budget; job well done.

But a lot happens between the complaint and the solution. And it’s there that the quality of the delegated property management expertise and thoroughness is truly decided. 

Was the tenant complaint acknowledged promptly? Was enough detail gathered before a contractor was sent out, or did someone have to go back and ask again? Was a visit even necessary, or could it have been resolved with a phone call? 

Did the contractor get everything they needed the first time? Was access arranged properly? Did anyone notice and chase if the contractor went quiet? Was the cost reasonable relative to the type of repair?

Two agents can both produce a perfectly costed £150 repair invoice while having delivered very different standards of management to get there. The invoice doesn’t tell the whole story. Was the repair carried out promptly, was the tenant treated courteously, was the tradesperson’s work clean and tidy, and was the repair solution followed up and confirmed before payment?

Do you have to check and chase up everything? 

As a landlord delegating these tasks to a professional agent, you really shouldn’t have to do any of this. If you do, it’s an indication that the tenancy management is failing. A second useful marker is how often you find yourself asking your agent what’s going on. 

Delay is often unavoidable. Juggling relations between tenants and contractors is no easy task. Contractors don’t always respond quickly, tenants aren’t always easy to reach or programme access, and some repairs genuinely take time because of the complexity or the lack of parts. 

The problem, though, is not always the wait; it’s about communication with you and the tenant. Keeping the tenant informed at all times and arranging alternative services where necessary. 

There’s a real difference between an agent who glibly says, don’t worry, “we’re on it” and one who can tell you the contractor attended on Tuesday, further parts are needed, a quote was requested on Wednesday, the tenant has been informed and the ball is currently in the contractor’s court. 

How your agent handles your tenant is key. A few days for a repair may be unavoidable, but a few days of silence about it usually isn’t, and it’s this silence more than delay that really gets their goat – it drives tenants to complain to the authorities and can easily escalate to a formal dispute. 

If you find yourself regularly having to follow up with your agent for an update rather than receiving one, it’s worth treating it as a warning. 

How does your agent cope when staff are off sick?

What happens when your usual contact is off sick? It’s a question landlords rarely think to ask of their agent, but it’s an important one. Does your agent have that bandwidth to deal effectively with your tenancies when they have staff absences?

Experienced property managers accumulate a huge amount of practical working knowledge involved with dealing with difficult tenants or contractors, recording what was agreed with the tenant last month, which repair is waiting on a quote or new part, and which compliance certificate is due. All that knowledge is not easily delegated to a junior in the practice, and if too much of it lives only in one person’s head, chaos ensues when they are off work. 

A well-run agency should never depend on one individual being available or lack of records to show where things are up to.  Somebody must be available in the agency capable of picking up a comprehensive file and smoothly taking over — what’s happened, what’s been agreed, what’s outstanding.

For you as a landlord, that continuity arguably tells you more about the quality of the service than how quickly any one property manager answers the phone. Under the Renters’ Rights Act 2025, comprehensive records are no longer an optional extra; they’re a vital aspect of tenancy management.

Letting and managing agents have been required to belong to a government-approved redress scheme since October 2014, under the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 and the Order that brought the duty into force.

More recently they must also belong to an approved client money protection scheme, since April 2019. Both regimes exist because a landlord or tenant with a dispute needs somewhere to take it if the tenancy management falls down. In these cases, a scheme adjudicator, somewhat like a court, decides on cases based on the evidence produced at the time, not on what someone remembers afterwards.

The requirement for documentary evidence is only going to grow. Since 27 December 2025, local housing authorities have been given strengthened powers under the Renters’ Rights Act to demand information and documents from landlords and agents. 

Councils are explicitly advising landlords to keep records of tenancy details, maintenance records and safety certificates so they can be produced on request. Further down the line, the Act also creates a Landlord Redress Scheme (a PRS Ombudsman), which is due to become a mandatory practice once the scheme administrator is appointed and scaled up.

The government’s roadmap for this is currently pointing to full landlord membership from 2028. When that arrives, "We'll deal with it; don’t worry” will not be an adequate response to a complaint. A fully documented account of the problem, what caused it, what was done to fix it within a reasonable time, and an invoice to show for it in the file, will be mandatory.

Good records, kept at the time rather than a reconstruction afterwards, not only save time in the long run, it protects you the landlord, the agent and the tenants alike. They provide transparency for the landlord and the authorities and help another property manager pick up an unfamiliar file quickly.

What questions should you ask when selecting an agent?

Rent achieved, short void periods, and low fees and repair costs will always matter to you as a landlord. But they’re measures of outcomes, not of the process, and process is where service quality really matters.  

When you’re choosing a new agent or reviewing one you already use, it’s worth asking questions that get at the working detail:

• How will I know what’s happening with a maintenance issue without having to chase you for an update?

• How do you make sure contractors and tenants are followed up if they go quiet?

• Could another member of your team pick up my property’s file today, if my usual contact were off?

• How do you record decisions, communications and compliance dates and can you show me?

• Which professional association, ombudsman redress scheme and client money protection scheme do you belong to, and can I see the certificates?

• What is your formal process for dealing with complaints to ensure it does not result in a formal complaint to the authorities?

Every one of those questions should be answered quickly and without hesitation. They will tell you more about how your property will actually be managed than any number of statistics the agencies throw at you. 

Here’s the bottom line

The strongest evidence of good property management is the agent’s capability and efficiency when things go wrong. It’s the problem that got fixed quickly and never reached the stage of escalating to a major issue. It’s the communication that kept the tenant and you in the picture when it was needed, and then it was the documentation that went with it.

Attribution: This article develops a perspective first sent to LandlordZONE by Stephen Marr, Co-Founder and Commercial Director of Nestsen, a maintenance-operations software platform for UK letting and managing agents. Nestsen’s commercial interest in agents adopting more structured record-keeping and workflow processes of the kind discussed above.