Four stories landed today with a common thread: paperwork stops being a formality and starts being a gate. The rental property register finally has a start date and a consequence worse than its £65 fee, Rightmove’s September index shows asking prices rising while the buyers underneath keep backing off, a Treasury review is quietly eyeing the business-rates relief that makes a holiday let a holiday let, and a London tribunal has just shown what happens when a landlord tries to make evidence disappear rather than produce it. None of it is a single dramatic headline. All of it changes what a landlord, holiday-let owner or seller needs on file before the next letter arrives.
The landlord register has a start date — and a stick worse than the £65 fee
MHCLG confirmed on 9 September that the long-delayed ‘Register your rental property’ service — the PRS Database, rebranded — will begin rolling out region by region from 15 December 2026, starting in the West Midlands, as Landlord Today reported at the time. The government’s own rollout guide sets out the full schedule: the South East comes fourth, live from 15 March 2027 with a three-month registration window closing 14 June 2027. Every landlord letting on an assured or regulated tenancy will need to register each property at £65 a year, submitting a gas safety record, an EICR, EPC and MEES exemption status where relevant, occupancy numbers and the rent actually charged.
The £65 fee is what everyone is talking about, and it is the least interesting number on the page, as Property118 points out. Further down sits the real teeth: once a region’s rollout has passed, an unregistered landlord will struggle to get a possession order at all. A landlord who has let a form slide for years could find themselves unable to recover a property from a tenant who has stopped paying — not because of anything the tenant did, but because a database entry never got filed. That is a different order of consequence to a £7,000 HHSRS fine; it is the whole enforcement route closing.
South East landlords have until June 2027, which sounds distant, but the pinch point is the paperwork: an EICR about to lapse, an EPC that expired two winters ago and was never renewed, a gas safety record for a tenant who has since moved on. Anyone with a live tenancy in Sussex, Kent or Surrey should build that folder now — EPC, EICR, gas safety, licensing status, actual rent charged — so registration next March is an afternoon’s admin rather than an archaeology project.
Asking prices had their best September in years — the buyers underneath them did not get the memo
Rightmove’s September House Price Index, published today, has the average new seller’s asking price up 0.7 per cent (£2,441) to £367,440 — the first monthly rise since May and a bigger September bump than usual. Look past the headline and the picture is softer: that average is still 0.8 per cent below where it stood a year ago, buyer enquiries are running 9 per cent behind last September, and the average two-year fixed mortgage rate has climbed to 5.29 per cent from 5.09 per cent the month before. Nationally 61 per cent of listings are finding a buyer, but that ranges from 91 per cent in Scotland to 42 per cent in London, with the South East sitting closer to the middle of that spread.
Sellers who read the 0.7 per cent figure and price ambitiously this autumn are working from half the picture. Rightmove’s own line — more homes on the market right now than at any point in the past twelve years — means a buyer with finance already arranged can afford to be patient, and a patient buyer reads a survey report line by line rather than skimming it. A seasonal asking-price bump does not change what a condition survey will actually find; it just means more competing listings to weigh it against.
Anyone marketing a property this autumn should price against sold comparables rather than the index headline, and get the obvious defects — the ones a HomeBuyer report flags in the first ten minutes — sorted before the first viewing rather than after a buyer’s survey knocks the offer down. Buyers, meanwhile, have genuine room to insist on their own independent survey rather than taking a seller’s EPC or condition summary at face value; with mortgage rates rising again, a renegotiation on the back of a proper survey finding is worth more this month than it was in the spring.
A holiday-let tax review just put business-rates relief back on the table
Chancellor John Healey is reviewing whether self-catering holiday lets should keep qualifying for small business rates relief, rather than being reclassified as second homes and moved onto council tax, as LandlordZone reports. Nothing is confirmed — this is a Treasury review ahead of the 28 October Budget, not announced policy — but the mechanics are clear enough. A qualifying self-catering property, available 140 days a year and actually let for 70, currently gets full business rates relief below a £12,000 rateable value; a reclassified second home would instead pay council tax, which a local authority can already double. Industry figures cited put the difference at roughly £1,000 to £5,000 a year per property depending on location.
This is the same genuine-business-versus-loophole argument that has run since councils got the power to double council tax on second homes, and the direction of travel matters more than the exact figure landing on Budget day. A holiday cottage in the Sussex countryside genuinely let for eight or nine months of the year is a different proposition to a coastal second home dressed up as a business to dodge the premium — but a blunt reclassification test will not easily tell the two apart, and EPC and safety compliance costs sit on top of whichever tax regime applies.
Owners of self-catering lets should pull together their actual letting-night records now — the real figure, not the 70-night minimum — because that evidence is exactly what will matter if any reclassification test turns on genuine trading activity rather than a blanket rule. It is also a reasonable moment to get an EPC and condition check done regardless of which tax regime lands, since a property quietly under-let to protect its business-rates status is often a property where maintenance has been quietly deferred as well.
Hiding a council letter from your tenants just turned a licensing fine into a £28,000 lesson
A First-tier Property Tribunal has ordered a Tower Hamlets landlord to repay £28,093 to four tenants — 70 per cent of the rent paid over roughly fourteen months — after he removed a council licensing letter addressed to them and told them it was “none of their business”, as LandlordZone reports. The maisonette sat inside Tower Hamlets’ additional licensing zone with no licence in place, no protected deposits, and — flagged by a building control inspection in July 2024 — no fire detection, no carbon monoxide or bedroom smoke alarms, no fire doors and no thumb lock.
An unlicensed HMO is a rent-repayment-order case on its own; what pushed this one toward the top of the tribunal’s range was the landlord actively working to keep his tenants uninformed. Tribunals weighing an RRO look at conduct alongside the underlying breach, and removing the evidence reads very differently to a panel than an honest admission of an oversight would. The safety defects on the list — no bedroom smoke alarms, no fire doors — are also a reminder that licensing paperwork and physical fire safety tend to go missing together, not separately.
Any landlord running an HMO in a licensing area who is not certain their licence is current should check it this week, not after a tenant complaint arrives — and if a council letter does turn up, this tribunal’s message is unambiguous: answering it is vastly cheaper than intercepting it. A same-week fire-safety check — smoke alarms in every bedroom, functioning fire doors, a working thumb lock — costs a fraction of what obstruction cost this landlord.
What I’d actually do
- Letting in the South East? Start a compliance folder now — EPC, EICR, gas safety, licensing status, actual rent charged — ahead of the register landing here between March and June 2027.
- Selling this autumn? Price against sold comparables rather than the index headline, and fix the obvious defects before the first viewing — buyer numbers are down and patience is up.
- Own a self-catering holiday let? Pull together your real letting-night records ahead of the October Budget, and do not let deferred maintenance hide behind a favourable tax status.
- Running a licensed HMO? Check your licence is current this week, and treat any council letter as something to answer, not intercept.
Whether it is a register asking for proof of an EICR, a tribunal panel weighing conduct as much as compliance, or a buyer reading a survey more carefully because they can afford to wait, today’s stories all come back to the same thing: what you can show beats what you assert. The practice carries out Building Surveys across the South East that give landlords, sellers and buyers exactly that kind of evidence. Get in touch.
Small print. General commentary, not advice for your specific circumstances — regulations, schemes and deadlines change, and your property is not the average property. Sources linked were accurate when read on 21 September 2026.