Today is the day the Renters’ Rights Act stops being patient: any landlord still sitting on a pre-1 May Section 21 or Section 8 notice has until close of business to get proceedings issued at court, or start again under rules that are slower and stricter. Away from that scramble, three quieter releases this week are more useful than the deadline itself — a rate hold with a widening split on the committee, a home-moving process that now averages seven months door to door, and an EPC register that’s gone noticeably quiet. None of the four is really about the number on the front of the release.
The Section 21 deadline that doesn’t care how busy your solicitor is
Today, 31 July, is the statutory cut-off for landlords relying on a Section 21 or Section 8 notice served before the Renters’ Rights Act abolished no-fault evictions on 1 May 2026. As Property118 reported on Thursday, notices served on or after 1 February but before 1 May must have had court proceedings issued no later than today, while notices served earlier generally had six months from the date of service — and once that window shuts, it does not reopen. Paul Shamplina of Landlord Action called it “a hard deadline with very real consequences,” and described the run on the courts this week as “unlike anything I have seen since starting Landlord Action.” ARLA Propertymark president Kim Lidbury put the practical risk plainly: miss it, and a landlord is “required to pursue possession under the new legislative framework instead, which introduces different grounds, processes and requirements.”
My read: the date itself is well publicised by now, but the thing that keeps catching landlords out is the same thing it always is — a paperwork gap nobody thought was fatal turning out to be fatal. Back in April, the Court of Appeal handed down judgment in Muca v El Amrani and Harker v Hubert, ruling that a Section 21 notice cannot be relied on if the tenant was never given the gas safety record from before they first moved in, even where every certificate since has been provided on time and the original tenancy pre-dates the 2015 rule that created the requirement. The court accepted this was a harsh, arguably unintended outcome, and ruled that way regardless. It is not something a landlord can go back and fix once the notice is served.
If you’re a landlord filing today, that ruling is worth ten minutes of your solicitor’s time before the claim goes in, not after. And if the deadline has already slipped past you, there is no shortcut available: a fresh Section 8 notice under the new grounds needs a longer notice period and, for a tenancy under twelve months old, may not be usable at all yet — which can turn what should have been a straightforward case into one that runs into next year.
Three rate-setters wanted a rise yesterday, not a cut
The Bank of England held Bank Rate at 3.75% on Thursday, but the vote split is the real story: the Monetary Policy Committee voted 6–3, with Megan Greene, Catherine Mann and Huw Pill all pushing for a 0.25-point rise to 4%, as Euronews reported. UK inflation did fall further than expected in June, to 2.6% from 2.8%, but that remains above target for the twenty-first month running, and renewed fighting in the Middle East has kept oil prices — and the committee’s nerves — unsettled, with Brent crude spiking from under $71 to over $100 a barrel mid-month before easing back to around $91.
My read: a hold gets reported as good news for borrowers by default, and this particular one probably shouldn’t be. Three votes for a rise is a bigger minority than the committee has carried in recent meetings, and the direction of travel looks like caution hardening, not relief arriving. If you’re weighing whether to wait for a cheaper rate before financing retrofit or repair work a survey has flagged, or before remortgaging to fund a refurbishment, this week’s vote is not the signal to wait for.
Home moves now take seven months. The bit you actually control is smaller than it looks
It now takes 216 days on average to move house in Britain — 62 days to find a buyer and a further 154 days to complete — according to Rightmove analysis reported by Landlord Today on Friday. Flats are the slowest property type, taking 169 days from agreed sale to completion against 149 for a terraced or semi-detached house, and location matters too: London sellers wait 174 days, the North East just 141, and Scotland — helped by its Home Report system and earlier disclosure — completes in 98 days total. Rightmove chief executive Johan Svanstrom called the 154-day completion wait “simply far too long,” with the firm pointing to conveyancer caseloads, search delays and leasehold complexity as the main drags on the process.
My read: none of that is really about surveys, but it isn’t nothing to do with them either. On a flat sale, the leasehold management pack — service charge accounts, buildings insurance, any building safety or cladding paperwork — routinely takes longer to arrive than the survey does, and a buyer who doesn’t request it the day an offer is accepted has already lost weeks by the time it becomes the thing everyone is waiting on. The survey is one of the few steps in that 216-day chain a buyer genuinely controls the timing of; most of the rest is sitting in someone else’s queue.
If you’re buying, instruct your survey the moment an offer is accepted rather than waiting for a mortgage offer to land first — the two can run in parallel, and a fortnight saved here is a fortnight you don’t get back once you’re behind someone else’s searches. If you’re selling a flat, get the management pack requested before you’ve even accepted an offer; on these figures it is more likely to be the slowest document in the chain than anything a surveyor or a lender produces.
EPC lodgements fell 10% this quarter. That’s the market cooling, not the assessors
Official statistics published Thursday show 486,000 EPCs were lodged in England and Wales in the second quarter of 2026, 10% down on the same quarter last year. The fall is not spread evenly: domestic EPCs on existing homes in England dropped 12%, while EPCs on new-build homes actually rose 2%, and the same pattern shows up in Wales — existing dwellings down 6%, new ones up 5%. Non-domestic certificates fell too, by 5% in England and 23% in Wales.
My read: an EPC is almost always triggered by an event — a sale, a new letting, a building completing — so a drop concentrated overwhelmingly in existing homes, while new-build EPCs hold up, lines up with exactly what the Rightmove figures above are already telling you: fewer transactions moving through the system, not fewer assessors turning up to do the work. The open question, and one this release can’t answer on its own, is how much of that gap is landlords quietly sitting on their hands rather than commissioning an EPC ahead of the 2030 EPC C deadline. Putting off a certificate you suspect will come back D or worse doesn’t make 2030 go away, it just shortens the runway you have to deal with it.
What I’d actually do
- Filing a Section 21 or Section 8 claim today? Get your solicitor to confirm the pre-occupation gas safety record was actually provided before you served notice, not just before you sue — April’s Court of Appeal ruling makes that one document capable of sinking an otherwise valid notice.
- Weighing whether to wait for a cheaper rate before financing repair or retrofit work? Don’t bank on it — this week’s MPC vote points toward caution, not an imminent cut.
- About to buy or sell a flat? Request the leasehold management pack immediately; on current figures it is more likely to be the bottleneck than your survey or your mortgage offer.
- Letting a property and yet to sort its EPC for 2030? A quiet quarter for lodgements is not the same as a quiet deadline — book the assessment now rather than waiting for the market to nudge you into it.
If today’s deadline has you checking whether a property’s compliance paperwork — EPC, gas safety, or otherwise — will actually hold up, the practice offers EPC assessments across the South East alongside full building surveys for buyers and sellers navigating that seven-month process. 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 31 July 2026.