The government has not kept all its promises around the introduction of the Renters’ Rights Act, says property expert Suzanne Smith, with housing lawyers, rather than landlords or tenants set to benefit from the added complexity.

When the Act received Royal Assent a year ago - on 27 October 2025 - it promised simpler regulation, a level playing field, and that good landlords had nothing to fear, according to solicitor and portfolio landlord Smith.

However, she believes the playing field has only been levelled in the places the government cared about, with the abolition of Section 21 - so landlords now need one of a narrow set of grounds to evict - fixed terms banned and rent increases capped at what a landlord can prove is the open-market rent.

“A landlord has no forum to complain about a tenant, and there is no mandatory ground when a tenant refuses access or sublets,” writes Smith in her post on The Independent Landlord blog. “The rent in advance rules are a mess, and without fixed terms, letting to students has become uneconomic.”

Difficult

Although daily life is much the same for landlords with long-term tenants in unfurnished houses, that’s not the case for student lets and HMOs, where the end of fixed terms has made life particularly difficult for landlords.

For student landlords, there’s no longer any certainty when the tenants will want to move out, making planning difficult, including scheduling refurbishment and knowing with certainty when the voids will be - leading to increased costs.

“I predict that many student landlords will leave the student market and focus on letting to non-students on a room-only basis instead of a joint tenancy, to avoid having costly empty properties,” she adds.

The most visible sign of the changes so far is a steady stream of tenants challenging rent increases at the First-tier Tribunal. Landlords have also become more cautious about who they let to, now that a tenancy can only be ended on one of the revised Section 8 grounds and rent guarantee insurance is being promoted hard as the answer.

Adapt

Letting agents have had to adapt to the ban on rent in advance, which has made aligning rent payments to the first of the month a bureaucratic exercise. It has also made letting to overseas students far riskier, unless they pay for a professional guarantor.

Smith, the author of The Good Landlord Handbook (published by Penguin) believes the jury is still out on whether local authorities will enforce the various rules fairly, proportionately and consistently, or how the courts will interpret the Act’s many ambiguities.

However, with housing lawyers the beneficiaries of more complex legislation, if something in the Act is unclear, she advises landlords to step back and ask what the law is intending to do, and what would seem fair if the positions were reversed. “Avoid running after loopholes…for those who don’t want to end up as a test case, the safest approach is to interpret ambiguity in the tenant’s favour, act fairly and reasonably, keep the property in good condition, maintain good records, and leave others to fight it out in court.”

‍