Welcome to Issue 001. Quick housekeeping. This newsletter goes out for the first time today to a small list of you, almost all from my own contacts and a few brave early signups. Thank you for being here.
The deal is one short, useful email a week, every Sunday morning. No daily, no spam, no upsells. If a week ever passes where I have nothing genuinely useful to say, I will send nothing.
Right, into it.
Why this week matters
The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 commenced on 1 May. The single most time-pressured thing in it, for landlords with existing tenants, is the Information Sheet requirement.
Every tenant on every let property in England must be given a written Information Sheet by Sunday 31 May 2026. Not “must have access to one”. Not “must be told about it”. They have to physically have it in their possession, served by post, by hand, or by email with a clear delivery record.
Penalties for a breach are up to £7,000 per tenancy. For a continuing breach, this rises to £40,000. The local housing authority enforces. There is a defence of “reasonable excuse” but Pinsent Masons’ early guidance is clear that “I forgot” or “I didn’t know” do not qualify.
What the Information Sheet must contain
The government has published a model Information Sheet on gov.uk (linked at the bottom of this email). You can use the model verbatim. You do not have to draft your own. The model covers the seven required topics: the end of fixed-term assured shorthold tenancies and the move to periodic tenancies; the new abolition of Section 21 “no-fault” evictions; grounds under which a landlord can now recover possession (Section 8 plus the new mandatory grounds); the new annual rent-increase limit and the Form 4A process; tenant rights to request a pet, and the landlord response window; the new ombudsman scheme, currently the Housing Ombudsman in scope; and the forthcoming national landlord database (registration window opens Q3 2026).
If you have an unusual letting (HMO, supported tenancy, rent-to-rent sublet, holiday let crossover), there are nuances. We will cover those in future issues. For a standard AST that converted to periodic in 2026, the model document is enough.
The five-step playbook for getting it sorted this week
Download the gov.uk model Information Sheet. Linked at the end of this email. Read it once yourself before you serve it. Four pages, five minutes.
List every let property and every tenant by name. If you have five properties with eight tenants between them, you serve eight Information Sheets, not five. Every named tenant on the agreement must receive one.
Decide your service method per tenant. Email if you have written email consent in the tenancy agreement, otherwise hand-delivery or first-class post. Get a record. A photo of the document at the front door, an email read receipt, or a Royal Mail tracked stub is enough.
Serve before Friday 29 May. Leave a working day buffer in case anything goes wrong. Information Sheet plus a covering line: “Required notice under the Renters’ Rights Act 2025. Please retain. No action required from you.”
Log it. Spreadsheet or compliance app, your choice. Tenant name, property, date served, method, record reference. If a future dispute happens, this log is your defence.
Total time for a 5 to 10 property portfolio: roughly 2 hours of admin if you batch it on one evening.
The trap most landlords are about to fall into
The Information Sheet is the visible bit. The harder bit is what comes next. The Act also requires you to be ready to use the new Form 4A for rent increases (one per year, two months’ notice, capped at the lower of LHA increase or open-market rent), and to be enrolled in the ombudsman scheme by the deadline (TBC, expected Q4 2026).
The trap is treating 31 May as a one-off task. The Act is a year-long compliance shift, not a Friday deadline. We will keep walking through it in future issues, one piece at a time.
Resources for this issue
The government model Information Sheet (gov.uk, free): the official template. Use it verbatim if you don’t want to draft your own.
Pinsent Masons’ Renters’ Rights Act 2025 guide for private landlords: plain-English legal commentary covering enforcement and defences.
Landlord Vision compliance log (free trial): compliance tracking software with built-in service log. Affiliate link, full disclosure.
From my own portfolio this week
I served all my Information Sheets through WhatsApp this week. One PDF per tenant, sent individually, with a short message asking each of them to confirm they had it. About 90 minutes spread across one evening, including the chasing.
Most of them came back the same day with a thumbs up. The interesting bit was that almost none of them knew what the document was for. So with every reply I sent the same one-liner: this is the new tenant rights notice the government now requires me to give you by 31 May, nothing changes for you, please keep it. That landed fine every time.
A couple started joking. One said he was definitely getting a pet now. Another asked if a goldfish counted. I told them yes you can ask, and yes I will probably say yes if it is reasonable. The Act lets tenants formally request a pet now, and the grounds on which a landlord can refuse are limited. So the joke is closer to the new reality than they thought. Worth working out your own pet policy this month before someone asks for real.
The bigger lesson for me was how few of my tenants had heard of the Act at all. If none of yours have asked you about it yet, that is normal. They are reading it in your delivery, not in the news. Send the Information Sheet, get the confirmation back, and you have done your bit.
That’s it for Issue 001. If this was useful, the most generous thing you can do is forward it to one other landlord you know. The newsletter grows by word of mouth.
If anything was wrong or unclear, hit reply. I read every email.
See you Sunday.
Eddie Sisman
Working landlord, Operator at heart
The Landlord Standard. A weekly UK landlord newsletter. Published Sunday mornings. Plain-English commentary, not legal advice. For specific situations, speak to a solicitor.