Guest post by Edward Romain, founder and CEO of Blind Justice UK
Romain: Systemic risks
Lawyers advising major landlords and build-to-rent operators have spent the better part of a year on the Renters’ Rights Act, which came into force on 1 May. Periodic tenancies, the end of fixed terms, the abolition of section 21. It has dominated the advice going out to clients.
I think a good deal of that advice has been aimed at the wrong risk.
The more immediate exposure for your clients is not the Renters’ Rights Act at all. It is the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, whose consumer protection provisions came into force in April 2025 and have barely featured in the sector’s compliance planning, or in much of the advice it has received.
The difference that should concern any firm advising in this space is enforcement. The Renters’ Rights Act is enforced, in the main, one tenant at a time, through the courts. That is slow and reactive, and for an operator with thousands of units the practical risk from any single breach is modest.
The DMCCA works in the opposite direction. It gives the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) a direct enforcement model: the regulator can decide for itself that a business has breached consumer protection law and impose a penalty of up to 10% of global annual turnover, without first having to win in court. It can examine an entire sector at once, and it does not need a complaining tenant to bring it a case.
Set the two regimes side by side and the asymmetry is one your clients need to understand. One is a private-law risk, realised slowly and piecemeal. The other is a regulatory risk, realised quickly, at scale, and against turnover.
A property or commercial team that has advised thoroughly on the first and barely mentioned the second has left the client exposed on the more dangerous flank.
So what should you be looking for when you review a client’s tenant-facing marketing? Having audited build-to-rent consumer communications against both regimes over recent months, I would point to three recurring problems.
The first is discount and pricing language. Listings advertise 20% off, or a saving of several hundred pounds, with no reference price and no genuine previous price.
The DMCCA’s restatement of the unfair commercial practices rules treats misleading price claims as exactly that, and its tightening of how a total price must be presented, including unavoidable fees, leaves little room for the headline-now, extras-later approach.
It is the kind of thing a client will not raise with you, because they do not see it as a legal question. It is one.
The second is incentives. Free months of rent, gift cards, fee waivers, almost all carrying conditions tucked behind an asterisk or buried in terms a prospective resident will not see until much later.
An incentive whose real conditions are hidden is a textbook misleading omission of material information, and it is worth asking any client in this sector to show you how their incentives are actually presented.
The third, and the most serious, is sequencing. Material pre-contractual information – the facts a reasonable person needs in order to decide – too often arrives only after a reservation fee has been paid.
The DMCCA is concerned with the timing of material information as much as its content. Information provided too late to inform the decision is, for these purposes, information omitted. That is a question of process as much as wording, and it is one a careful adviser can catch early.
None of this is exotic. It is the ordinary furniture of high-volume rental marketing, repeated across hundreds of listings and automated journeys, which is precisely what makes it a systemic regulatory risk rather than an isolated one. A single defective tenancy notice affects one tenant. A non-compliant pricing convention affects every listing on the platform, and it is visible to the regulator from the outside, without anyone having to complain.
For firms advising this sector, that is the uncomfortable part. If a client faces a CMA action over its marketing, the first question asked internally will be what its advisers told it.
A property or commercial team that confined its Renters’ Rights Act advice to tenancy structure and notice periods, and never looked at the consumer-protection exposure in the client’s own listings, will not have a comfortable answer.
Advising well here is not complicated, but it has to start from the consumer journey, not the tenancy agreement.
It means reference-pricing discipline, so that every discount claim rests on a genuine, evidenced prior price. It means incentive terms stated plainly and up front. It means front-loading the material information a resident needs before any money changes hands. And it means reviewing the whole journey, from the first online listing to the signed agreement, as a consumer-protection question and not only a housing law one.
The Renters’ Rights Act deserves the attention it has had. But it is not the law most likely to produce a large, fast and public enforcement action against a major operator in the next 18 months. The DMCCA is. The firms whose advice reflects that will be the ones their clients thank.
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