A new rent review platform aims to help landlords and agents agree rents after 1^st May without going to a tribunal.

Many rent reviews are handled through spreadsheets and email chains making it too manual, fragmented and hard to evidence if challenged, co-founder of MarketRent, Rajeev Nayyar, tells LandlordZONE.

“We’re trying to remove the need to go to tribunal by creating a negotiation and mediation process,” he says. “There were only a few hundred rent challenges through tribunals last year but there could be thousands more after 1st May – and the process can already take months.”

Under the Renters’ Rights Act, rents can only be increased once every 12 months with two months’ notice and must match the true market rent. Landlords must use the Section 13 process, and all rent-review clauses will become invalid. Tenants can challenge this at the First Tier Tribunal which can’t set a rent higher than the landlord’s proposal, and any increase will only apply from the date of the decision, not retrospectively.

Evidence

Nayyar says its platform creates a purpose-built workflow for rent reviews that saves time, improves consistency and strengthens the evidence behind each review - with better communication between agents, landlords and tenants and with a clearer record of how decisions were reached.

“Agents can put in comparable evidence to compile a tribunal-ready pack for landlords with a rent suggestion and when they’re happy, it creates a prescribed rent review form which is sent to the tenant who can then submit counterevidence,” he explains. “We’re now looking to build a similar tool for self-managing landlords.”

Alongside the launch of its platform, the prop tech firm is also highlighting its free rent indexation tool at MarketRent.co.uk which gives users an instant indexed rent reference point using ONS data, providing a starting point for conversations around rent review.

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