An opinion piece by Agent Rainmaker’s Sally Lawson
Agents are heads-down, working their asses off to survive the Renters Rights Act (RRA) changes, to the detriment of everything else. But in order to get where they’re thriving too, agents must refocus and rebuild to make back the property stock losses they’ve faced.
Waiting isn’t just neutral, it’s a decision. Managed stock has fallen off a cliff across this sector… That’s not just my opinion, that’s what every letting agent I talk to is telling me. The agents who are already back on their feet? They aren’t lucky, they just stopped waiting for better to come.
The RRA is a seismic reset. And a reset means you rebuild, deliberately, on three pillars. Not vague ones, or “adapt and see”. Three specific, unglamorous, commercially hard-nosed pillars.
Pillar One – Acquisitions
If your instruction pipeline has dried up, stop waiting for it to refill organically and go and buy the stock instead.
Acquiring another agency’s book isn’t a plan B for agents who’ve lost their nerve. It’s the fastest, most controllable way to rebuild managed stock in a market where organic growth has stalled. But it only works if you do the boring part properly: get prepared, have the systems in place ready, and hit the ground running. None of these should be an afterthought once you’ve signed the dotted line.
The deals that usually do fail are the ones that had no plans in place for the first 90 days.
Pillar Two – Lead Generation
If your growth strategy is still waiting for the phone to ring, you’ve essentially built a business with no engine. Landlords haven’t stopped needing agents, they’ve just stopped trusting the ones who can’t explain why using an agent now matters more than it did two years ago.
That’s an agent problem, not a landlord one. So use all of your compliance knowledge to help them, develop services that they might need, and market to them properly. Agents who are proactively going out and making the case for compliance are the ones filling the gap left by the ones who aren’t.
Pillar Three – New Services
This is the one people skip because it’s the least comfortable. The compliance burden the RRA has piled onto landlords isn’t just a headache to be managed, but a service most agents haven’t monetised yet.
Landlords need help they didn’t need before, and they will pay for it if you build it properly and stop treating it as something you throw in for free to keep a difficult client happy. Move away from the mindset that letting agents have only ever offered the fully-managed or let-only options, and think big. Some of our agents offer up to 16 different services, with 53 separate charging points, all designed to help landlords pick and choose what they need support with.
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None of these pillars are optional. Acquisitions without lead generation buys you someone else’s stagnant book. Lead generation without new services gets you landlords in the door who leave the moment a competitor makes a better compliance pitch. You need all three, running at the same time, or you’re not rebuilding – you’re just rearranging the furniture in a business that’s already shrinking.
I’ll say the quiet part loudly – this industry has spent a year in shock. That’s understandable. But the agents still describing the RRA as something that happened to them are those who’ll still be describing it that way in a year’s time, smaller than they are now.
The ones who treat it as a starting gun for a rebuild? They’ll be running the agencies worth working for.
Stop waiting for the weather to change – and start watertighting the roof!
