What a letting agent's 10% actually buys

A full-management letting agent in England typically charges somewhere around 10% of the rent, and what you get for it splits fairly cleanly into two halves. One half is process — a sequence of steps that has to happen in the right order, with the right paperwork, by the right dates. The other half is a person doing something in the physical world: standing in the property, holding the keys, taking the call at nine on a Sunday evening.

The process half is what software replaces. The other half is not, and any pitch that tells you otherwise is selling you something. This is an attempt at an honest split.

The arithmetic, so you can do it with your own numbers

Do this with your actual rent rather than an example, because the answer changes a lot between a flat in the north and a house in the south east.

On rent of £1,000 a month, a 10% management fee is £1,200 a year. On £2,000 a month it is £2,400. That is before whatever is charged separately for tenant find, renewals, inventories or the annual gas certificate arrangement — those are often extras, and they are worth adding up from your own statements rather than assuming.

For comparison, Tenarize is £15 a month for one to five properties, which is £180 a year, or £144 paid annually. We would rather show the two numbers and let you subtract them than tell you what you will save, because what you save depends entirely on what your agent currently does and how much of it you are willing to do yourself.

The half that is process

These are the parts of the job that are a defined sequence with defined outputs. They take attention and they take knowing what the list is — but they do not require anyone to be in the building.

• Knowing what the compliance list is, and when each item expires. Gas safety annually, EICR every five years, EPC every ten, alarms, the Renters' Rights Act Information Sheet. Most of the value an agent adds here is simply that they have the list and you might not — which is why we published ours, with a link to the official guidance behind every item.
• Vetting the tenant. Right to Rent, identity, income, credit, previous landlord reference, guarantor where affordability does not stand up alone. This is a checklist with documents attached to it, and the Home Office publishes the landlord's guide to right to rent checks for the part of it that carries a criminal penalty.
• Producing and signing the tenancy agreement. A generated agreement and an e-signature does what a posted paper copy did, with a clearer record of who signed and when.
• Collecting the rent and noticing when it does not arrive. A Direct Debit mandate, a payment history, and something that flags an arrear on the day it happens rather than at the end of the month.
• Holding the documents where they can be found again. Two years later, in a deposit dispute, the question is not whether you did the inventory — it is whether you can produce it, dated.
• Reporting for tax. Rent in, expenses out, a total per tax year, in a format your accountant or your Making Tax Digital submission can take. HMRC's find out if and when you need to use Making Tax Digital for Income Tax tells you which year this starts to apply to you, and it is sooner than most landlords expect.

None of that is trivial work. It is, however, work with a shape, which is exactly the kind of work that suits being systematised — and it is most of what the fee covers on a tenancy where nothing goes wrong.

The half that is a person

This is the part worth being straight about, because a landlord who leaves an agent expecting to lose nothing is in for an unpleasant few months.

• Viewings and marketing. Somebody has to be at the property, repeatedly, at times that suit other people. If you work full time and the property is an hour away, this alone can be worth the fee.
• Being local. Holding keys, letting a contractor in, meeting the gas engineer, checking whether the damp patch is what the photo suggests.
• Being called at the weekend. Not the volume of calls — the fact that they do not come to you.
• Handling the difficult conversation in person. Rent arrears, a complaint about noise, an end-of-tenancy disagreement about the state of the carpet. Some landlords are fine doing this and some find it genuinely miserable, and it is worth knowing which you are before deciding.
• Local knowledge of what the property should let for, and what the market is doing on your street rather than in your postcode district.

If most of what you are paying for is on that second list, an agent is doing something for you that software cannot, and switching to self-management will be a downgrade you feel. That is a real outcome and it is worth saying out loud.

The questions worth asking before you decide

The useful exercise is not "agent or software". It is working out which half of the fee you are actually consuming.

1. In the last twelve months, how many times did your agent physically go to the property? If the answer is one inspection, you are mostly paying for process.
2. How far away do you live, and can you do a viewing on a Tuesday afternoon? This is the single biggest practical constraint, and it has nothing to do with paperwork.
3. What did they charge on top of the percentage? Renewal fees, inventory fees, tenant-find fees. Add them to the 10% before comparing anything.
4. How would you feel about the arrears conversation? Be honest with yourself. Some people would rather pay £1,200 a year than have it.
5. Do you actually want to be the person the tenant contacts? Self-management means the tenant relationship is yours. For a lot of landlords with one or two properties that is a feature — they would rather know. For others it is the thing they were paying to avoid.

Two things worth knowing about doing it yourself

If you do move to self-managing, two practical points that catch people out, and it is better to hear them now.

Direct Debit is not instant. Bacs takes up to seven working days on a new mandate and around four once it is established, and a new mandate needs a couple of days to lodge before the first collection. What you get for that wait is a mandate, an automatic retry, a payment history and a record — rather than a bank transfer that may or may not have been sent. But if you are used to a transfer landing the same day, the first month feels slow, and knowing that in advance is worth more than a reassuring sentence.

Nobody is checking your work. An agent, whatever else they are, is a second pair of eyes on the deadline. Self-managing means the certificate expiry, the deposit protection window and the notice period are all yours to track, and since tenancies became periodic from the outset there is no renewal date to make you look at the file.

That second point is really the whole argument for using something structured rather than a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet holds what you put in it. It does not know that an EICR expires in six weeks, and it will not produce a dated audit trail if you ever end up in front of a tribunal.

Where to check this yourself

If you are costing out leaving an agent, these are the obligations that become yours, straight from the source:

• Renting out your property: guidance for landlords — GOV.UK's own overview of the whole job
• Renters' Rights Act: an overview for landlords — what changed on 1 May 2026
• The certificates: gas safety (HSE), electrical safety standards and the minimum energy efficiency standard for EPCs
• Landlord's guide to right to rent checks — Home Office
• Deposit protection schemes and landlords — GOV.UK
• Making Tax Digital for Income Tax — HMRC, including which year it starts for you
• Shelter and Citizens Advice — free, independent advice on a specific situation

Tenarize is built for the process half of the list — the checklists, the expiry dates, the agreement, the rent, the records. It does not do viewings, and it will not take the call on Sunday. It starts at £15 a month, the first month is free, and there is a full refund inside three months if no tenancy is active and it turns out not to suit you.