The price thesis
The day-one price is the price.
Since 1 May 2026, the marketing price a landlord publishes on day one is, in practice, the rent for the life of the tenancy. Not until renewal — under the periodic regime there are no renewals. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 removed all five mechanisms a landlord used to correct a mispriced let. This page walks through each one.
The walk · five levers, closed
For thirty years, a mispriced let was recoverable. Accept a higher offer at let. Push the rent at renewal. Lock a fresh fixed term. Take six months up front. Serve Section 21 and start again. The Act closes every one of those routes — each on the statute book.
Old escape route: accept the highest offer
Bidding is banned. The advertised rent is the ceiling.
Section 56 prohibits soliciting, encouraging or accepting a penny above the advertised figure — the rule that made under-pricing self-correcting is gone. List at £2,400 when the market would have borne £2,650 and you have donated £3,000 a year, for the duration of the tenancy, to the tenant who got there first.
Old escape route: push the rent at renewal
One review a year. The Tribunal can only reduce.
Section 13 of the Housing Act 1988 is now the only route to a higher rent: one proposal per twelve months, on Form 4A, with two months’ notice — and the First-tier Tribunal can never set a higher rent than you proposed. Let at £200 under market and you lose £2,400 in year one, £2,400 again in year two. Even with a perfectly executed review each year, the deficit takes three years to clear.
Old escape route: lock a fresh fixed term
Every tenancy is periodic from day one.
Fixed-term ASTs no longer exist, and tenants may leave at any time on two months’ written notice. Over-pricing no longer buys negotiation leverage — it buys tenant departures, void weeks, and a re-list at a lower figure. There is no fixed term to wait out.
Old escape route: take six months up front
Rent in advance is banned.
Section 8 stops everything beyond the routine first month at move-in — no lump sum from an overseas applicant, no advance rent in place of a guarantor, no “I’ll just pay the year now”. Every tenancy lives or dies on its monthly cash flow. No premium can rescue a mispriced advert.
Old escape route: serve Section 21 and re-let
Section 21 is abolished.
Possession now runs through Section 8 grounds only, ground by ground, with evidence — and the mandatory arrears ground, Ground 8, has risen to thirteen weeks of arrears for weekly tenancies and three months for monthly ones. A tenant paying in full and on time cannot be removed for the landlord’s commercial convenience, full stop. “Evict and re-let” is no longer a pricing correction.
“Each of the five levers, on its own, would be a meaningful constraint. Together, they are total.”
The day-one pricing decision · 8 May 2026The arithmetic
What under-pricing costs.
One honest sum. The calculator multiplies the monthly shortfall by twelve — nothing else. Multi-year recovery depends on Section 13 execution, so the prose carries our published example rather than a model.
You advertise at £2,200. The market would have borne £2,400. Under RRA 2025 s.56 the advertised figure is the ceiling — no applicant can lawfully pay more.
Year one alone: £2,400 donated.
And year two looks the same — a Section 13 review can only close part of the gap; in our published example a £200 shortfall takes three years to clear.
Worked example · 8 May 2026 · not a forecastThe verdict
We won’t take an instruction at the wrong price.
“There is no longer any mechanism — legal, financial, or operational — by which a landlord can recover from a mispriced opening rent during the life of the tenancy.”
The day-one pricing decision · 8 May 2026
If a landlord insists on a price our data does not support, we say so. Pre-RRA, the wrong instruction cost some void weeks; post-RRA it costs the lifetime yield of the tenancy. The answer is to get the launch right: an evidenced valuation, a listing that goes live no more than four weeks before the available date, and a re-let cycle engineered to land in August.