If your letting agent gets it wrong, who is legally responsible?

You are. The duties that come with letting a property in England attach to the landlord, and a management agreement is a contract between you and your agent about who does the work — not a transfer of who answers for it. Depending on the duty, an agent may be in scope alongside you. That is not the same as being in scope instead of you.

This is not an argument against using an agent. It is the reason to know exactly what is being done in your name, on what dates, and where the evidence of it is kept.

The gap between doing the work and holding the duty

A full-management agreement can sensibly say that the agent arranges the annual gas safety check, books the EICR, serves the Renters' Rights Act Information Sheet, and registers the deposit. Most do. That is what the fee is for, and it is worth being explicit about in the contract.

What the contract cannot do is change the fact that the property is let by you. If a duty is missed, the failure has happened to your tenancy. You may well have a claim against your agent afterwards — but that is a second, separate argument, running on your time and at your cost, after the first one has already gone against you.

The practical consequence is a strange one: the landlord who is most exposed is often the one who feels safest, because they have delegated the work and stopped looking at it.

The four failures that reach you

Almost everything that goes wrong here is one of four things, and none of them announces itself.

A certificate that quietly lapsed. An agent changes account manager, a reminder does not get set, and a gas safety certificate runs out in the eleventh month of a tenancy. Letting a property with gas appliances and no valid certificate is a criminal offence, and only a Gas Safe registered engineer can carry out the check. A missing or failed EICR can mean fines of up to £30,000 under the Electrical Safety Standards Regulations 2020. An EPC below band E without a registered exemption is unlawful under the minimum energy efficiency standards and can mean up to £5,000, and non-compliance on the smoke alarm and carbon monoxide alarm requirements carries up to £5,000 too.

A deposit protected late, or prescribed information never served. A deposit has to reach a government-approved scheme within 30 days of receipt, with the prescribed information going to the tenant inside the same window. Where the deposit sits under an agent's scheme membership, you are relying on a date you have never seen. It matters twice over: at the end of the tenancy, and at the point you need possession.

Right to Rent done inconsistently. The check has to cover every adult occupier before the tenancy begins, whether or not they are named on the agreement and whether or not they pay rent. It is the duty most often delegated and least often evidenced back to the landlord — and it is the one that cannot be reconstructed later, because the whole point is what was seen, and when.

A possession case with nothing behind it. Since 1 May 2026 the only route to possession against a tenant's wishes is a Section 8 notice on a statutory ground, and most of those grounds are proved on paper — the tenancy, the rent record, the notices, the dates. A file you have never held is a poor foundation for a claim you may one day have to bring.

What actually happens if this carries on

Not much, for a long time. That is the shape of the risk, and it is why it gets left.

Then something arrives that asks for a date. A tenant queries whether their deposit was protected on time. A council officer asks for the current EICR. A deposit adjudicator asks what condition the property was in at check-in, and what evidence there is. A possession claim needs the compliance file. Every one of those questions is answered with a document and a date, and in each case the person being asked is you.

The version that costs most is the slowest one. A tenancy runs for six years across two agents, the file is never fully handed over, and nobody notices that the alarms were signed off as fitted but never recorded as tested with the tenant present on the day the tenancy began. Nothing goes wrong. Then something does, and there is no record either way — which, when it is your name on the property, is functionally the same as not having done it.

You cannot audit what you cannot see

A monthly statement tells you the rent came in. It does not tell you the EICR expires in March, that the Information Sheet went to one of two joint tenants, or that the Right to Rent follow-up date for a tenant with a time-limited right passed in June.

This is the real problem with delegated compliance, and it is not about trust. Good agents do this work properly. The issue is that you hold the duty and they hold the evidence, and there is no routine moment in the arrangement where the two are put side by side.

What holding it yourself looks like

Three things, and none of them require you to become a compliance officer.

Know the list. There are ten items to have in place before a tenant moves in, an eleventh if the property is furnished, and six more for a room-by-room let. We publish the whole thing, item by item, in the compliance checklist for letting a property in England — there is nothing in it you need an account to read.

Hold the dates. Every certificate expires. A duty with a date on it needs something that watches the date, and a diary entry made once, three years ago, is not that.

Keep the record dated. Not the certificate alone, but when it was issued, when it was served, when it was received, and by whom.

How Tenarize does that

Tenarize is for private landlords in England who manage their own properties, and this is the part it is built around.

The compliance checklist is the actual statutory list, per property, with each item wanting its document rather than a tick. Expiry dates go on the documents, and Tenarize raises a notification and an email before a certificate or licence lapses, with anything still outstanding repeated in a weekly digest on Monday mornings — the full list of what it will chase you about includes deposit deadlines, Right to Rent follow-ups, inventory signatures, inspections and served notices reaching expiry.

Deposits are tracked against the date the deposit was actually received and recorded as protected on time or protected late, rather than folded into one tick. Tenarize does not protect the deposit for you — that has to sit with one of the government-approved schemes, chosen and set up by you — but it does hold the deadline and the dates. And everything logged against a tenancy comes out as a dated audit trail PDF, which is the document version of the answer to every question in this post.

What is different afterwards

The difference is not that you work harder than your agent did. It is that the duty and the evidence finally sit in the same place — the one place they were always legally required to meet, which is with you.

You know what is in place, what expires when, and where the proof is. A question from a council, a tenant or a tribunal becomes a download rather than a search through three years of email. And the thing that used to be true — that you carried all the liability and saw almost none of the paperwork — stops being true.

If you are weighing that against what an agent charges for it, the honest split is in what a letting agent's 10% actually buys, and the practical steps for taking a tenancy back are in leaving your letting agent.

Where to check this yourself

• Renting out a property — GOV.UK's overview of a landlord's duties in England
• Landlords' responsibility for gas safety — HSE, with the Gas Safe Register for checking an engineer
• Electrical safety standards in the private rented sector — GOV.UK, the EICR guidance
• Minimum energy efficiency standard: landlord guidance and find an energy certificate — GOV.UK
• Smoke and carbon monoxide alarms: explanatory booklet for landlords — GOV.UK
• The Renters' Rights Act Information Sheet 2026 — GOV.UK, free to download
• Landlord's guide to right to rent checks — GOV.UK
• Deposit protection schemes and landlords — GOV.UK, including the approved schemes
• Repossessing your privately rented property after 1 May 2026 — GOV.UK, for Section 8 and its grounds
• Shelter and Citizens Advice — free, independent advice on a specific situation

Tenarize is £15 a month for one to five properties, with the first month free. The help centre is free to read either way, agent or no agent.