In little more than a year, property management in England has taken on three major new obligations, each added to a compliance regime that was already dense. In April 2025, employer National Insurance rose from 13.8% to 15%, and the earnings threshold at which employers start paying it fell from £9,100 to £5,000. In April 2026, Making Tax Digital for Income Tax began requiring landlords with more than £50,000 in qualifying income to keep digital records and file quarterly updates with HMRC. That threshold drops to £30,000 next April and £20,000 the year after. Then on 1 May 2026, the Renters’ Rights Act abolished section 21 “no-fault” evictions and converted existing tenancies to rolling periodic agreements. Section 8 is now the only route to possession, and it requires a landlord to prove a legal ground, usually with documentation.
These changes fall hardest on the people doing day-to-day management work: letting agents, in-house property managers, and landlords who run their own portfolios. Most of them work in small operations. The average UK letting agency manages around 340 properties with a staff of 14, according to Goodlord’s 2025 industry survey, and more than half of agencies employ five or fewer people. When agents are asked why they are looking at automation, they point to the same pressures: rising compliance requirements, expanding workloads, and administrative strain.
Rajan Kukadia, founding partner at UK property management technology firm Brickwise and a landlord for roughly 15 years, describes the gap sharply. In his estimate, a property manager’s role is built around roughly 70 properties, and many managers now carry double that or more. There is no official benchmark for manager caseloads, and industry estimates vary widely by property type and support staff. Still, Kukadia’s broader read matches what agents themselves report: property managers are overworked and overwhelmed.
One of the less visible problems in property management is how often documentation lapses go unnoticed until they create legal or financial exposure. Electrical safety is one example. Since 2020, landlords in England have had to have a competent person inspect a rental property’s electrical installations at least every five years. Councils can fine landlords up to £30,000 for failing to comply.
Kukadia says that when his firm onboards new clients onto its compliance tracking system, roughly 30% of their documentation needs to be renewed or acted on immediately. That figure comes from the company’s own clients, a group that sought out compliance help, and has not been independently verified. It may not reflect the wider market. It does suggest how easily lapses can build up in portfolios that nobody is tracking systematically.
Part of the problem is structural. Landlords and managers increasingly hold mixed portfolios of standard buy-to-lets, houses in multiple occupation, and short-term accommodation, and each type carries its own certification and licensing requirements. “Because they’re forced down that route, it means they’ve got three, four times the amount of paperwork that they have to deal with,” Kukadia says. When a renewal slips, the first notice is often a council penalty that arrives after the deadline has passed.
Spreading across property types is a reasonable strategy, since no single approach reliably delivers the best yield. But every additional property type adds another layer of compliance to track.
The rise in employer National Insurance has made it harder for small and medium-sized firms to justify hiring another staff member as portfolios grow. Institutional operators can spread those costs across thousands of units and build compliance systems at a scale a firm managing a few hundred cannot match.
The shift in ownership is already visible. Savills estimates that small individual landlords sold around 290,000 rental properties while the build-to-rent sector delivered 130,000 new homes. It also estimates that roughly 170,000 property sales were subject to capital gains tax in 2023–24, up from under 76,000 a decade earlier. CBRE’s 2026 outlook likewise notes that private landlords have continued to leave the sector.
Kukadia expects that consolidation to speed up as operating costs rise. “That’s where these big Blackstones or the Blackrocks are going to take a lot of market share through their acquisitions of smaller, small- to medium-sized operators and landlords,” he says.
The strain shows up day to day as well. When a manager already juggling dozens of open tasks gets two or three urgent maintenance calls in one morning, the strategic work of growing the portfolio or improving the business gets pushed aside. “Property managers don’t have the time to do the things that they actually really care about,” Kukadia says.
Tenant expectations have moved toward something closer to hospitality-level responsiveness. Kukadia describes a culture where even a 30-minute delay in answering a query causes frustration. “People require urgent responses. They don’t like to wait around,” he says.
That gap matters because communication failures are often the first step toward lost tenants or legal disputes. Rent arrears are the clearest example. Kukadia says that if a missed payment isn’t caught within the first week, the case can escalate into the courts, leaving a landlord covering mortgage costs without rental income for three to six months. “You’re not dealing with it immediately – it will just get to the court systems,” he says.
Official figures suggest that estimate may be conservative. Ministry of Justice data for April to June 2026 put the median time from a landlord’s possession claim to repossession at 27.1 weeks, or more than six months. Since section 21 was abolished, landlords seeking possession for arrears must also prove their grounds under section 8, which rewards landlords who can document when payments were missed and what action they took. For a small landlord on thin margins, one prolonged arrears case can create a cash-flow crisis that forces a sale.
There is plenty of talk about how property management will modernize, but adoption on the ground is uneven. A 2025 Inventory Base survey found that 53% of letting agencies had no plans to adopt AI or automation, and only 12% had adopted it extensively. More recent research points to growing interest but a clear divide. In Alto’s 2026 survey, 66% of estate and letting professionals said they expect to rely on compliance and anti-money-laundering automation, yet about a third said they were nervous or unsure about AI. Nearly nine in ten larger agencies planned to adopt AI tools this year. Smaller independents were less likely to. The firms under the most pressure are the least likely to be changing how they work.
“There are a lot of people who are stuck in their legacy ways – if it’s not broken, why fix it?” Kukadia says. Resistance is not always philosophical. He describes walking into a local estate agency where the manager told him right away that she hated AI, mainly because she feared it would replace her job.
A growing number of property management software providers, Brickwise among them, now offer some version of the same core functions: automated arrears reminders, triage of incoming maintenance requests, and alerts for upcoming compliance deadlines. The case for these tools is that they take repetitive tracking off a manager’s desk and escalate only what needs human judgment, rather than removing the manager from the tenant relationship. Kukadia draws that line himself. “I always advise all of my clients to balance AI with human interaction,” he says. “Don’t just rely on full automation.”
For the sector, the question is less whether any particular tool gets adopted than whether small operators can keep absorbing the administrative load at all. Making Tax Digital will bring more landlords into quarterly reporting in each of the next two years, the Renters’ Rights Act continues to phase in, and the firms least equipped to handle the extra work are the ones most likely to be bought out. How smaller managers deal with that load, whether by rebuilding their processes, sharing it with others, or leaving the market, will shape who owns and manages England’s rental housing over the next several years.
About the Expert: Rajan Kukadia is a founding partner at UK property management technology firm Brickwise and has been a landlord for roughly 15 years.
This article is based on information provided by the expert source cited above. It is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or real estate advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals before making any real estate or financial decisions.
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