Renter’s Rights, AI & the End of ‘Winging It’ in Lettings with Rajeev Nayyar

There’s a moment in this conversation with Rajeev Nayyar where the discussion stops being about the Renter’s Rights Act and starts becoming something much bigger.

Because beneath all the headlines around tribunals, rent reviews and compliance sits a more fundamental shift that I don’t think the industry - or government, for that matter - has fully grasped yet.

For years, the private rented sector has largely operated on a kind of informal equilibrium. Most landlords and agents have tried to do the right thing most of the time, most tenants have simply wanted a safe, well-managed home, and despite the ever-growing mountain of legislation, the system has continued to function because a huge proportion of the market simply never fully engaged with the complexity sitting underneath it.

That's about to change- and not just because of the Renter’s Rights Act.

In this episode of The Viking Chats, Raj (best known as founder of Fixflo and now launching MarketRent) joins me for a genuinely fascinating conversation that starts with rent tribunals and ends up exploring the future architecture of the UK tech landscape.

We dive deep into one of the most controversial and least understood parts of the new legislation: the changes to rent reviews and the tribunal process. What problem were they trying to solve? And have they potentially created a much bigger one in the process?

Raj breaks down the mechanics of the old system, the logic behind the reforms and the unintended consequences that could follow if tribunal volumes increase. We discuss the operational pressure this could place on agents, landlords and the court system itself, as well as the broader implications for investment into the private rented sector and Build to Rent.

But this episode goes far beyond policy.

One of the most compelling parts of the discussion centres around AI and what happens when tenants no longer need to understand housing legislation in order to enforce it. We are moving rapidly towards a world where an AI assistant sitting on someone’s phone can identify expired compliance documents, missed deadlines or procedural failures instantly - and potentially take action on a tenant’s behalf.

That changes the dynamic of the industry completely.

Not because tenants suddenly become adversarial, but because the long-standing imbalance of information and process knowledge starts to disappear.

We talk about what that means for professionalism in the sector, why “winging it” is becoming an increasingly dangerous operational model, and why agencies that fail to tighten up systems, communication and documentation could find themselves under enormous pressure.

At the same time, we explore the opportunity hidden within all of this.

Because while there’s understandable anxiety around regulation and enforcement, there is also the potential for a more professional, more transparent and ultimately more trusted private rented sector to emerge from the other side.

Raj also shares the thinking behind MarketRent, the new platform he’s building to help agents manage rent reviews in a far more structured, evidence-led and transparent way. Drawing clear parallels with the early days of Fixflo, he explains why he believes the industry now needs a dedicated workflow around rent evidence, negotiation and tribunal readiness.

Along the way, we also get into PropTech strategy, government digitisation, data infrastructure, the future role of AI in housing, and whether the UK is doing enough to create the technological foundations the property sector is going to need over the next decade.

This is one of those episodes that starts in one place and ends somewhere much bigger.

And whether you’re an agent, landlord, PropTech founder or just someone trying to make sense of where the industry is heading next, there is a huge amount in here worth thinking about.

Transcript

Hello everybody and welcome to the latest episode of the Viking Chats podcast. I'm delighted to be joined today by someone a lot of you will probably recognise. Mr. Rajiv Naya of Fix Flow fame. Mr. Fix Flow, I think is probably the best name. Mr. Former Fix Flow. Mr. Former Fix Flow. But with deep love for it. Good to have you here. Lovely to see you. How are you? Yeah, I'm good man. I'm good. I've been missing your joyful face on the scene. you've temporarily abandoned us for the dark side that is commercial property? I did but the gravitational... I don't know, I haven't heard anything yet. You just brought me back. Yeah, so it saddled up again, trying to help letting agents and I'll tell you all about it, but it's a really interesting time to be back in the centre as a time of change. Yeah. As a time of risk, as a time of opportunity and I think people are rethinking business models and all sorts of things and I'm happy for wherever this conversation goes but most importantly, lovely to see you, thanks for inviting me. It's so good to see you mate, it's so good to see you. So look for those a lot of people will know who you are and know a bit of your backstory but there are those who won't. So let's go way back when pre-proptech. Okay. And so kind of just - Just tell everyone a little bit about your journey into what led you to start even thinking about a prop tech product. - Okay, so way back in the midst of time 'cause I'm now feeling very old. - You are. - Thank you. - You are very old. - I started in the property sector but as a real estate solicitor. - Agents love them. - So mainly commercial property. So less guilty than others but still a solicitor. So I worked in London. - Respect all the conveniences that's out there that we do genuinely love. - Of course, and there are some excellent conveniences. So I started as a solicitor working in London. Then I got rugby, well, cut tickets to New Zealand and couldn't get enough time off work. So I quit that job and got a job in New Zealand. - I mean, as you do, why not? Yeah, definitely your commitment, dude. - And this is part of how it ended up in PropTech. So I was over in New Zealand watching rugby, having a brilliant time working with lovely people. And at that time, I was renting out a property quite close to your office actually. - So that was your property back here that you'd been living in? - I'd been living in and I rented out because I moved to the other side of the world and I was renting as a tenant in New Zealand and at the same time I saw the pain of repairs. - From both sides? - From both sides. So my tenants in London had a problem and really struggled and it was expensive and it was painful and the time zones didn't help. And at the same time I had a materially leaky roof in my property in New Zealand. And my landlady who was lovely, genuinely lovely lady called Sheila, lived about two hours drive away. She kept coming to have a look and they kept patching the wrong bit of the roof and everything went mouldy. We had dehumidifiers going on. In fact, I set up a track with aluminium foil to try and collect the drops into a bucket to protect her floor. It was just a mess. I thought there had to be a better way. came back to England, sort of bootstrapped a bit. So I worked as a consultant to a football club in London as a part-time job to keep money taking over. Well, I walked the streets and spoke to as many letting agents as would speak to me, surveyed as many teams. - You were incredible at door stepping. I mean, that was, you've always said, we've talked about this over the years, and you've always said that was kind of really what, what drove fixed flow, what made it a success in those early days was you were relentless. Can I call you back in three months? Yes Raj, you can call back in three months. Three months to the day. - You're pretending not to be Christian as well. I remember calling base's office, hi, can I speak with Christian? And now I know you and I know your voice. I know you said, I'm sorry, Christian's not here. But every month I call back. - You would call every month. - They used to make the office, if they used to make the office, so I still do it. I still do it, we get a sales call. I'd be like, it's Christian, what's the call regarding? Let me see if he's available. I'm really sorry Christians are quite often come out the guys joke because when I come back on the phone I tend to slightly change my voice. I'll be like I'm really sorry, but Christian seems to be unavailable at the moment You didn't even change your voice for me. I listen to you know a decade later you'd be sat here and so did that Launch fix low which is a repairs and maintenance software system. It's brilliant if you haven't looked at it And I'm no longer involved, but it is and it's worked with loads of lexic agents in the UK and abroad And you know You you were one of those products that came at a really kind of pivotal time in PropTech where we were we were moving away From CRM's doing everything. Yeah, I think kind of really Prior to that it was really the big boys that did stuff and it kind of spun out largely of CRMs and you were kind of part of that new wave, you know, good Lord was a year or two after you guys I think were very Very similar kind of time and there were quite a few products that were like hey, hold on a minute This bit This bit's crap. Yeah, this bit and actually you know, I've talked about this before the time where you were building fix flow and and I not for the idea of building a proctect business because I mean that wasn't really a thing then But I mean, we were actually in the process of tendering a very similar product within base. Okay. Because again, a bit like you, our portfolio was starting to grow. I mean, we're like, this maintenance reporting thing is rubbish. Like, how do you know, how do you get the details? How do you make sure the tenants have done the basic checks and we're not sending an engineer out to fix a boiler when they've just knocked the power off or, you know, all that sort of stuff? We were literally, we'd done mock-ups of the platform, we'd identified four companies we wanted to tender for the job, and you walked in the door and were like, "I built this!" And then I'm like, "Cool, don't need to spend money on that then." - For me, it all starts with the problem. So, and the core of the problem with repairs, it's a multifaceted process. You've got land, you're all landwards, tenants or tenants, contractor or contractors and you've got a lessing agent coordinating that process and getting good, clear communications, transparency, openness and collaboration to solve the problems. What we were trying to do in the problem was there was no platform to bring everything together. That's kind of how I've approached all of the things I've got involved in. But I think a sign of what a good product you've built is that you've never really had much of a competitor. I think you're about to now. I say you, you're not part of Fixed Flare anymore. But I think Fixed Flare is going into an interesting phase now because there's an interesting company called Tappy, which is coming over from New Zealand and Australia, which is kind of doing a similar thing with a slightly different vibe, slightly newer coding and tech, which is always, always going to be the challenge in technology. But I think, you know, we mentioned good Lord. I think really interesting, you look at good Lord, the space they're in, and that's become highly competitive, right? There's been some that have come and gone, but there are several suppliers now within that space competing for that. Whereas I think really interesting, and we fixed for, you know, when I think back to even the early stage or early phases of your platform, like that very visual picture led, click, click, click multiple choice, what is it, plumbing, boiler, blah, blah, blah. But also, and this is still rare now, from very early stage, you had the multilingual thing. And I think that was a fascinating, like ahead of its time, like concepts. I mean, it was something that I think was relatively easy from a technical standpoint to plug into the platform, relatively. - It became increasingly easy over time, but at the start it wasn't particularly easy. - But you know, even now it's relatively unheard of. - But I don't know if that was driven by the fact that you'd been in London, which is an incredibly diverse rental market. - It was driven by speaking to people. So as I lived relatively close to here, yes. I was sort of biased by London leasing agents, but I went out across the country in the first year. I think I did 70 plus speaking events around the country at landlord and letting agent groups. So I got to meet hundreds and hundreds of people. In almost every case, there's a sort of nuance or a slightly different take or an insight that comes from doing that, sort of wearing out the shoe leather. And the multi-lingual stuff came from both tenants and landlords, our letting agents. It sort of just felt like a natural thing to put into the platform. So, so what was that? So how long did you have fixed flow before? Arean, it's Aryan. Yeah. Port it, right? Um, so how long was that fixed flow journey from kind of launching the product to your exit? So we incorporated the company in 2012. We really launched. So there was a lot of learning and a lot, a lot of mistakes in the early days. and some great early adopters who really set us on a good path. And I'm still speaking to lots of them. 2013, mid-2013 is when I think we actually launched, you know, in a sense that you would really like. Well, it took us four years to get the deposit tree from registering the company to launching. It's an interesting journey, but it's really valuable in terms of the insight. And then 2021, we sold the business to Ariane, and then I stayed on with the group and ended up running all of their UK businesses from 2021 to 2024. The group is now being run by a lady called Rachel who is phenomenal. If you haven't met her, she is one of the smartest people I've ever met. Okay, so we're going to get an invite to Rachel to come and have a chat with her. She's excellent and I then left and the intent was to have a bit of downtime but some of the people I knew. I seem to remember some sort of conversation about you moving to Portugal and buying a nice house that I live in on the outgarden. So a slightly different path was taken, it was how they described it. So I left. Too much time in your hands? It was a weekend off, finished on the Friday, on the Monday start of the next thing. I do remember, I remember talking to the leader up and you're like, "Yeah, you know, just take some time for myself." And the next conversation was like, So yeah, I've taken the CEO role of a brilliant self-storage software business and this is a business you've invested into. I've invested into, I'm now chairman of that business. What's the takeover? You know, the owner of the business was retiring and looking for someone to carry on the legacy and selected us as the people he wanted to do that. And I've been in that business now about 14 months. So if you have any self-storage facilities, check out Space Manager, the leading software provider in the European sector. There we go. Plug, plug, plug. There we go. This is why the man builds successful businesses. Never an opportunity myth. I've worked on advising and, in some cases, investing in other pro-tech businesses, in part based on what they're trying to do, the problem they're trying to get, and in part because of the person. So a prime example of that is John Paul, who is a wonderful human being. Prospector Pro. Prospector Pro. great business leader so I've been an investor and an advisor in that business from now. Very cool piece of kit. It is very nice. I've seen it a couple of times and it is a slick piece of kit. If we did lots of phone calling I'd be inclined to be a client of theirs but actually we find in base we're not a cool heavy business. I think some of what he's doing around agents and insights and reporting might be interesting for everybody. But, yeah, BrickFlow, which is a, I'm going to do a terrible job of explaining it, but I'll describe it as money supermarket for bridging finance, development finance and commercial property. I think that's a pretty good description. And they're doing some really interesting things around equity funding as well. And the CEO there is again, a lovely person, really driven, the kind of person I want to spend time with. And I find really inspirational like I'll Ian and so I've done a bit of that and then more recently are you happy with to move to the more recent let's let's keep rolling okay more recently I was looking at the renters rights bill as it was then the renters rights ads and I thought well you and I yet again I thought so quite a lot because I revealed to you yes when you revealed your new business I I was like, you've done it again. Before the business was trying to solve the problem. And I think I could be horribly wrong. And I hope I'm horribly wrong because if I'm horribly wrong, then the industry and the market will continue to function unimpeded. There were a few problems that I could see. In the Wrenters' Rights Act. In the Wrenters' Rights Act. I mean, I think that's possibly understating the fact. And so I'm going to zero in on one, which is around rent reviews. So for me, the process is deliberately asymmetric. - Well, so let's just go back a couple of steps before we go into this in more detail. I think what's really fascinating about the rent review and rent tribunal is, you know, I've been an agent for 24 years now, and nearly 30. We've had a base for 22. Before the renters reform bill kicked off, before this whole saga of the last two years kicked off and there became a focus on rent reviews and what that looked like. I'd never come across about the rent review tribunal. I've never known an agent, I've never spoken to an agent about it, I've never had an agent go oh my god a tenants done this, I'd never come across it. When I did come across it, the previous structure prior to the changes implemented on the first to May, to me, made total sense. - Yep. - Small fee to escalate to a tribunal, and then the tribunal could rule anything up to market rent, which could be above what the landlord or letting agent had proposed. - Yes. - It would, if they agreed with that, it would be backdated to when the notice would have implemented that rent review and everyone's. But equally, if they decree that it's unfair, it's set at what is deemed a fair level and applied accordingly. But unfortunately, that's not how they've mapped it out for the Renters Rights Act. - Exactly right. So I'm gonna set back and look at the why. Why was this change brought through and then what is the change? But the previous situation felt like a balanced approach me. And this felt materially imbalanced but with some really big consequences. Huge, huge consequences. I think the really interesting one with the former structure was the fact that the tribunal could award a rent higher than what the landlord or letting agent was asking. And I think that's the really important thing is that there was a legitimate motivation for landlords and letting agents to be fair and reasonable. Yes. Because the likelihood is A, you wouldn't have the friction. The tenant would go, do you know what? You're right. Rents have gone up. I would pay 2400 on the open market. I pay 2000 now. So yes, 2150. What a fantastic compromise. Thank you very much. But you know, if you decided to roll the dice and take that landlord to court the tribunal could turn around and go, "Dude, you admitted it was a fair rem. The landlord evidence it was 2400, we are now awarding 2400." Landlord is compensated for having been reasonable, tenant is penalised for being egregious. It was a fair set of rules. It kept a kind of status quo and because of that what it was like 3,000 cases a year in a 4.4 million property market. I believe it was below that because you have to strip out fair rent cases. I'll come to the numbers in a minute because I spent a bit of time digging. Because I'm geeky and get fixated on stuff. So that's how it used to work. It's how it used to work. Why make changes to this process that's in relatively well balance? Getting rid of section 21 and the move to periodic or perpetual, depending on your perspective, tendencies, there was a risk, a legitimate risk that needed to be addressed, which was that landlords would seek to regain possession of their property by serving rent review increases that were completely unsustainable. Completely unsustainable, not based in fact until they needed to. Rent is 2,000, but I want you out, so I'm going to say it's 3,000 if you want to start. 3,000, 10,000, 15,000. Just a number that would, in effect, be a section 21 eviction by different means. So entirely get the need for it. What came through, as you've described, is a situation when, as proposed and as adopted, rent reviews will only, so there is a court fee, it's £47.37. - So they were gonna scrap that. I mean, at least they went back on that 'cause they were gonna make it completely free. Which was, bunkers. They were also considering a £200 fee and ended up at £47. £47 I think is important when I come to some of the business models I've seen. The rent review, even if accepted, will only take effect from the date of the tribunal determination. I'm going to come back to tribunal determination to backlogs. That also sets the next rent review date. And so it felt asymmetric. So I spent a bit of time with politicians. - I don't think it felt like, I think, I think pretty much everyone was universally in agree that it was slated incredibly one sided. - I spent some time with politicians and I am not a natural politician, not that I particularly enjoy it, but I spent three or four months speaking with people with some sympathy from both sides of the house. I'm not gonna name any names, but they understood and very kindly wrote letters and submitted questions. - I think it was really hard. I mean, I was lucky enough to sit in a room on several occasions with MHCLG or with the Tories. What did they remain? Again, deluk. - Deluk. - All the lovely acronyms. But I was lucky enough through my work with the Zootpil Lettings Advisory Board and also the Lettings Industry Council. We got to sit in rooms. I mean, what I will say is through that journey, probably more with the conservatives than when it switched to labor, but there was more industry engagement than I've known on any legislation before. Because historically, that conversation would kind of happen in quiet rooms with the big boys. You know, the big 5, 10, 15 agents would get to sit in a room with government and have a bit of a chat. But the rest of the industry, which you and I both know, is the vast majority of the smaller independence, we were shut out of the room. I think what was nice that maybe it was lip service was that throughout this process we did have conversations, we did flag these things. I'm not sure that they were necessarily listening to it. And that's what it said, to me, the conversation is two ways, what you say and what the other person hears or vice versa. and it felt like there was an openness to allow the industry to speak. There wasn't an openness to listen to the industry and absorb. And so while there were very well-founded views being shared by people with a huge amount of experience. There was a lot of legitimate concern that was dismissed as self-interest. Correct. It was there is there is this and and I find this fascinating right we're talking at the the moment, I mean, they said it's not going to happen. But Rachel Reeves the other day mentioned, oh, we might look at red controls. And then it's quickly been shot down. And no, no, no, we're not looking at that. But I find there is a fascinating psychological attitude to landlords and the rental sector, specifically, because I think we have this cost to live in crisis at the moment, which kind of is is impacting everyone from every corner. And rent, yes, is probably one of the tenants, if not the tenants largest outgoing, much like a mortgage would be for a homeowner. But what I find fascinating in the dialogue is whilst there's moans about it, it doesn't seem as focused when we look at transport costs and utility costs and super much food costs. Whilst there are conversations around this stuff, it almost seems to be like, oh but there's can do, you know, that's just business. Businesses have to make money. And profit isn't a dirty word unless you're a landlord. And then there is this, maybe it's because I work within Lettings and the PRS that maybe I'm more sensitive to it. But I feel like there is a stronger feeling a stronger emotion vitriol kind of towards landlords and the PRS that they are somehow more to blame for the cost of living crisis or should be held more to account for the cost of living crisis than we are, for example, holding supermarkets, petrol stations, utility supplies to account. I don't know. Maybe it's my perception because I have a a little bit more sensitive to it. - And look at it slightly differently. So I would imagine, I don't know, that there will be discussions with the major supermarket chains, which are a much more consolidated group, about costs of basic. So if you think about the sort of basic human needs, somewhere safe to rest your head, safe and secure and maintained. - Yeah. - Food, there's been work on the energy price cap and other measures. The housing issue, the housing crisis, the housing debacle has been caused by the fact that the social sector has been decimated. We've got rid of all of our social housing. And in the absence of that, the private sector was encouraged to fill the void with the motivation from I think it was 1988 of some certainty of the rules of the game. And so capital came in, homes were provided, some good, some bad, mainly I believe good. There is now a treatment of the private renter sector as an extension of the social housing. And that's by, you could argue, whether it's by necessity because of previous failings or by design because it was always going to end up thus. But that's how it is increasingly viewed. I think that's... Well, the ongoing erosion of social housing stock, right, combined with none being built as well, meant that that pivot has happened further and faster than I hopefully was ever imagined. It became far more of a demand in the private rental sector. I mean, I think we should be somewhere around something like 7 million social homes around now and I think we're at something like 1.6. I think it's 3.7 but it depends how you define it. Either way, there is a material shortfall and then the taxation just baffles me. So if the philosophy we want landlords to act professionally to run this like a business you should also allow them to offset the costs of their business and that just doesn't happen so well section 24 just exactly you know there's there's a lot of talk about all the different things that damaged and politics is always going to be politics there's always going to be the finger pointing but I am astonished by some of the rhetoric coming out of certain parties and particularly the conservatives because they were our our leading party for 14 years and yet if we want to really talk about damage to the PRS I don't think there has been anything as damaging as Section 24. I totally agree but it's not just damaging it is illogical and unfair. If you want to drive professionalism and people to run it like a business you have to treat it as a business from all aspects. Not just the burden. Slightly slight check there. Well, not really. I mean, we've gone where it goes. But we're all talking about the underpinning factors that come back to why the government felt they needed to do to reframe how the rent tribunal works. And so they've ended up in what I considered to be an asymmetric process, I spent time hugely unsuccessfully trying to persuade people that There were three or four things I was arguing for the first was the legislation allows the rent reviews to be backdated to the rent Review date if the tribunal is overwhelmed. So my first area of interest was What statistics are there on current tribunal performance? What does overwhelm to mean and how we have some transparency? So what's the clarity some clarity please just so we know What's the what's the current case volume? How long do they call average? Median and average yeah, because you get some outliers does it diverge? What tracking is in place because if there's a big red button to be pressed. Yeah, how does anyone know? What what that trigger point is? So and how will people be able to feed into or understand whether it's the same as before which is the current hypothesis Better or worse. I just thought there had to be a process around that so The statistics weren't being collected. Yeah, the second was Around the impact on the taxpayer So understanding whether this has been appropriately costed and that there are a couple of bits there. So in Bill to Rent, the government, the taxpayer has issued billions of guarantees on Bill to Rent developments as part of the move to institutional capital coming in. Each year, those developments have to be revalued. Part of the valuation process is looking at the future cash flows and covenants. If the value is do not believe that rent reviews can be carried out in practice, they will discount those impacting by order of magnitude, the capital value, potentially putting taxpayer first of all taxpayer existing guarantees at risk. There are more guarantees coming out. And thirdly, and this is probably most important to society, it will decrease the feasibility of a lot of sites. If you cannot assume a sensible level of rental value, it's supposed to be an inflation proof. I'm putting those taxpayer guarantees at risk. The second aspect is the cost. I've looked at that from a couple of sides. I think everyone listening to this knows you're not going to deliver a tribunal for 47 quid. No, you're not. So take you. I mean, if a property licensing application typically costs you 1500 quid for a council to process that through an in-house team, you know, it's or even even county court. So what does the county court filing start at that 200 quid? It's materially more something around there. So there's a cost. There's going to be a cost to taxpayer or even if assumptions are broadly rights of 20% of rent reviews being challenged as part of the course. That's huge. That would be because it's, I mean, it's not even 1% now. No. I mean, that's 20% is insane. So if we take a conservative 10x uplift in volume, which I think it will be orders of magnitude more, but again, could be horribly wrong. We'll go on to a topic I want to talk with you about in a minute. And I think, yeah, I think this is where it is. So what is the increase in capacity in the tribunal service? Is it proportionate? Are there systems in place? - Oh, you and I both know there is no increased capacity. - There is some increased capacity, but it's not a 2X, it's not a 10X, there's not 100X. And in terms of systems, they are being considered. So one of the things I suggested was why don't we build a system for the tribunal service at the-- - It just looks at the data. - It looks at the data and flags, those that require, and the feedback was not great on that because it wasn't a centrally initiated tender process. - I mean, even if you had segments, right? Even if you said, look, if it's within like 3%, then it defaults to this. If it's like 3% to 6%, it does this. And anything 6% or more out of market, it goes to tribunal. - If you go back to why they're doing this, which we talked about, it is to stop section 21 by the back door. It is not, I believe, to ensure that everything pound penny to market is to make sure that it's not so materially divergent because market rent is based on comparable. So really is there to catch the nightmares, the ones that most people at a glance would go that is mental? I think that's what it's there for. Although I think it's been seized on by certain industry participants as something slightly different which is it is to make sure that everything is exactly at the market right which is a subjective interpretation. That's the first thing. And secondly, I've seen some businesses pop up that are very well SEO'd. So they appear first on Google, other search engines are available. (laughs) And for a 29 pound fee, they've got a calculator. So you pay us 29 pounds, you pay the court, 47 pounds. What's the amount of the rent? What's the amount of the increase? This is how much you would save if the tribunal takes 15 months to determine. Do you want us to do it? So it's sort of creating a factory like approach to driving volume, which works against the operation of the sector, investment in the sector, building new homes and ultimately cost-efficient government. And it grounds government, right? I mean, we're, like you said, there's some capacity for growth, but going to 20% is already a radical increase of what we see now. And if the figures go above that to 200,000. I mean that is kind of where estimates are coming out. I mean that's insane. A hundred times. So look I think actually let's stay on this topic because I know why we're on this topic because we're coming round to what your latest venture is. So let's stay on that because then I want to talk to you about you know I think the rent tribune is just is one of the issues. I think we're about to come into a transformational shift in the paradigm of power that sits within the rental sector. And that, sorry, we'll stay on this, we'll come back to yours. I lost now. So the rental sector has always operated on a kind of substructure where tenants are largely uneducated and uninformed on their rights and responsibilities. I don't think that's a very fair statement to make. The vast majority of tenants are unaware of, I would say 90% of their rights as a tenant. Or the mechanics of how to enforce those. - I think that is the mechanism of enforcement. - Yeah, knowing process and time and resource to facilitate it. But those three things have underpinned the market that has always lent slightly towards landlord and letting agent. Because the operational model, they're kind of the person in control with the asset, so to speak. And for the vast majority of the market, I don't think that's necessarily been an evil axis of power. There are the outliers, there are the rogue elements, the criminally bad landlords and letting agents who are out there to deceive and trick and whatever else. But I think the vast majority of the market we know has fair intentions. Yes, has fair and moderate intentions. But it is always operated on a substructure of, as long as the rent's pretty much paid on time and you pretty much look after it and from a tenants perspective, as long as the property is pretty much maintained and we're kind of left to our own devices, people are fundamentally attendant, doesn't wake up every morning going, oh my God, it's the EICR out of date or whatever like that. They just, they want to feel safe and valued and looked after and I think that's, and that has kind of maintained a relative status quo. We've obviously gone through the last 20 years, So it probably started with the Tenancy Deposit Act in 2007. I mean, obviously, we're the housing act. Prior to that, there were bits and pieces. But really, I would say, since the Tenancy Deposit legislation came in that last 19, 20 years, has seen a constant implementation of changes, legislative changes, many of which have ended up being well-intentioned, but quite often a bit of a damp squid in terms of tackling housing issues, professionalizing the sector, because there is still this era of ignorance from tenants, under resourced councils to effectively enforce it and the such like. But I think the huge change we're seeing right now is obviously tech driven, you know, and it is this new era of AI that we're coming into. And I think, what we're going to see is a dynamic paradigm shift in that relationship. Because we now have an incredibly complex, highly legislated, not regulated, because we know we're not a regulated industry, but we're a heavily legislated industry and housing and sector. But we're coming into an We're near and now where tenants won't have to have the knowledge, they won't have to understand the process and they won't have to have the time or resources because if we believe where AI and LLMs etc are going and where they're going to reach most expectation is kind of end of this year, early next year, we will largely be seeing more and more agentic Products out there and for those that are unclear what that means is products that actually do tasks for you rather than you have to ask for something Or if you ask if somebody can actually go off and buy you something or fill out a form online or and so What I think the government is vastly unprepared for Is the fact that we're now, you know potentially in a year two years time We're gonna have tenants with a smartphone where an agent or a landlord will send an email or won't and AI will go in your pocket. Hey, you know your gas safety expired two days ago Which is a breach of the property license? Would you like me to report this to Hackney Council? You know your tenancy deposit hasn't been registered within 28 days. It is now 29 days Would you like me to report that to the appropriate authorities? And I think what is really fascinating is Tenants won't have to have the knowledge now AI won't always get it right But that's not going to be the tenants problem because most of the legislation There is no cost implication on a tenant. I mean the rent tribunal you've got that 47 quid But the vast majority of actions a tenant can take there's no cost the only cost is the time and effort to kind of facilitate the process and And so we're walking into an era of an array of reports on this litany of legislative compliance. It depends what you think about human nature. I think that's where this all starts from. If you believe that humans or large proportion of humans will seek at every opportunity to inflict pain, suffering, malice upon others, then the agents, when the message comes back. But it depends on their relationship, right? It depends on how that human feels treated. This is what that's exactly what I was going to say. If the relationship is good, and they feel like they are being treated well and appreciated, respected, the the the single-pig and instead of saying yes, submit a complaint, they're more likely, I believe, to say, just tell Christian, not that your agency would ever do this, just tell Christian the gas safety has expired, he probably wants to get one. I feel that's what the likeliest outcome will be. For those where there is a fractious relationship, then it's another mallet with which to hit someone. But I think if we talk about letting's, I think if you, if you talk about the reputation that a state agency has from a public perception point of view and the rental sector has, I think, look, I think in part, it will drive the ongoing professionalization of our sector. I think the outcome potentially is that we will end up with a better housing sector because the rogue element who have skirted and danced around this stuff, now won't be able to. And they will have to make a very, very clear decision now of, I either as you alluded to earlier, I either now run this as a professional business, and I either educate myself on everything I need to know to facilitate it, or I find a good lettings and property management company to do it for me and I accept that operational cost or I get the hell out of dodge and I go and find another place where I feel I can make money on my terms. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. There's also a nuance I think in what you said, which is the public perception of estate agents as a mass, I think is materially more negative than the perception of the public about their specific estate agent or their specific letting agent. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a letting agent to bad, traffic warden to bad. And then what about your, oh, got really friendly. Oh, he's really chatty. You left the op on the other day. And so there's a sort of my letting agent's great. So this is a, I say that's a former solicitor account. It's, oh, they're really boring, but my mate is a solicitor and account. They're really fun. So there's a big difference between the sort of aim of the flow of a sector and the person you're directly dealing with. Yeah, I think the only reason I'm cautious and where my mind falls to the other end of the spectrum with this is what I'm also aware is the people that I tend to have conversations about this with, like yourselves, the agents that I tend to find myself in the room with at conferences, at training events, at whatever, they're not really the part of the market that I'm really talking about. They're not really the part of the market that I'm worried about. The part that I'm worried about, and like I said, you know, maybe I shouldn't be worried. Maybe the end result is, yes, there's going to be some bumpy times ahead, but five years from now, we have a radically different PRS with a lot fewer landlord operators, potentially a lot fewer letting agent operations, but the standard of service, professionalism, expertise, compliance is top notch. I think that's a reasonably likely outcome. Yeah. And I don't think it's accidental. So as you look at the patchwork of regulation and legislation for the sector, I think in part it's being driven by a desire for political headlines. It's easier to get a headline. We are improving gas safety for tenants than to take the various pieces of existing legislation to simplify, consolidate and educate, which would have a bigger impact. It's rising professionalism, greater consolidation both at owner level and operator level, I think is a desired consequence. I would imagine it's a desired consequence. just the example we talked about before where tax payer back guarantees have been provided to institutions to create institutional residential investments which operate more like commercial property than residential in nature. So I think it's a desired multi-government outcome and those agencies that have their processes set up and have the good good way but a government ready to handle this. This is the other thing. Like that's my other concern is that what we keep hearing from government is that all of the channels that handle this, whether it's trading standards, whether it's teams within councils, whether it's the courts, whether it's tribunals, resources minimum. So how are they, we might, you know, there might be this tidal wave of two, three years of insane friction with this huge escalation of things being reported and etc etc. Yeah, my concern is how the government manages and mitigates. I'm going to use the magic one because it's as yet unproven, which is a gentic AI on the other side. Well, this is true. Yeah. But like you said, and legislative shifts to deliver common sense or just efficacy. Because, you know, we will let's bring it back to the tribunals, because that leads us very nicely into what your next little project is. But again, you know, government have said, with a lot of the phrasing and terminology within the renters' right tack, let's just get it done, let's get it delivered, and let's see where the problems are. Because then we can always tweak things. They have said they'll be willing to revisit and tweak things. So, you know, the Tribunal Act, if that gets overwhelmed, if they reinstigate backdating, that changes the dynamic. I mean, that instantly changes the dynamic and would almost overnight solve their problem. Yes. And I think they've taken a move fast and break things approach, which in, as you know, as a tech founder, is easier to do in technology because you can roll back, you can iterate, you can do so. When you're changing the working practices of tribunal judges. When you're changing the cost structure of the court, when you're changing legislation, when you have to educate a market about those changes, it's not as easy as a rollback. We might decide to press the big red button that we described earlier, but from the moment of making that decision to pressing the big red button and the big red button doing something may well be a reasonable lag. So and look, I think that I think we always knew that was going to be the process any time you have a government set out to do something as big as They've set out to do with the renters reform slash right bill slash act. Yeah There was always going to be a lot of gray area, right because when you try to do that much at once It would have taken them years to get the minutiae right. Yes, something that that delivers from day dot and is maintainable and balanced and fair. I think we always knew there was going to be stuff left in the weeds. There's going to be like, we'll figure this out afterwards. So let's talk about what your next business is because obviously a lot of the reason we've drilled down into this, you've identified as an issue. And so how are you helping agents and landlords solve that? as simply as possible is the answer to say. I think that the rent review process is going to be more operationally challenging. I think it will have to be handled in a different way. There's new form, for example, that came out last weekend, the form 4A. And so the core hypothesis is rent reviews have got harder. Evidence in, so avoiding tribunals is a great thing to do. If you can inform people transparently, openly, clearly about why what you're proposing is reasonable. Help them to, if they want to negotiate, structure their negotiation in the right way, to track everything, to keep landlords informed. It's a bit like the repairs issue that we dealt with at Fixley. I saw lots of similarities. Multifaceted, trying to solve or get to a shared outcome. We built market rents. And so market rent is a platform that takes all of your rent make sure they're all tracked that you know which ones are coming up. It helps you to build your comparables pack in a sensible logical order, achieve rental comparables, asking rental comparables, why there are appropriate comparables, indexation based on PIPR, get landlord instructions with negotiation thresholds and then to manage the negotiation from start to end between multiple parties. So landlords, tenants, there can be more than one in each category and then to document it appropriately at the end and then we are integrating with many CRMs at the moment so they'll be coming out in the next few weeks. I mean that's the great thing that's changed since you started FixFlow. It has. You know that was I mean no, impossible. You needed major strategic partnerships at a very high level with one or two CRMs and that would typically lock you out of other ones. And the nice thing now is those barriers are largely gone, right? We've got Alto taking a very open approach to partners. We've obviously got the Reaper app marketplace, which kind of drove a lot of that. And then we've got a lot of CRMs that had always taken a very open approach, your agent OS's and your Des Rezes and, you know, quite a lot of ones that actually it was never really talked about that much, but a lot of them had documented It's APAs or open APIs or whatever, but I think the nice thing, the really big boys who very much kind of locked out a big chunk of the market, that is now an open market to kind of plug and play with. And they've invested in their APIs, they've invested in their documentation, and they've invested in teams to help partners to be successful as well. So within a few weeks, CRM at a time, all the rent reviews will pull through into our platform, be managed when work is completed and the workflow is run and everything is documented at all, pushed back and update the rent review date and everything else. So that's it. So we did a soft launch two weeks ago with the press release which was kindly picked up in the trade press. We were looking for 10 early adopters. We got 80 inquiries in 30 hours. Nice. We then had to turn it into a wait list because we weren't quite expecting that. We've got 10 early adopters, about 15,000 units using the platform at the moment. And then we're going to roll out a cohort site. We don't want to go too fast. Yeah. We want to take it in a sequence. Get it right. Get some case studies. Get the use cases right with the various CRM. So one at a time roll out. Kind of. You kind of want one to go to Tribunal pretty quick, right? because ideally you want to see, does it work? Or does it fall flat on its face? Like, you know, equally like, do they turn around and go, ah, this data set wasn't provided or? - So it's a new world. Nobody really knows. What we did is we went through every tribunal case over the last year, read 100 of them ish by I and the rest by AI. - AI. (laughing) - To understand we've spoken with leading residential real estate lawyers who go to the tribunal and have inputted into it. - Can I imagine David Smith was probably in that? - David is a plethora. - Excellent and highly recommended lawyer. And then what I'm trying to do is get this in front of some first tier tribunal judges at the moment. That's what I'm working on at the moment because we want it to work well. - We want to kind of create a standard, right? It's kind of what we're trying to do tenancy deposit conclusions at deposit trees trying to create this if there becomes this standardized methodology and data sets and approach even there might be some some minor nuances here and there but fundamentally if tenants kind of know what to expect and landlords and letting agents you know if there is the kind of this understood legitimized framework that everyone can follow that kind of everyone wins at the end of it because it just becomes a a systemised process that we all become familiar with. - And it's, I think it's so much about saying, warning, this is beyond what market rent would look like. So, be aware that's probably not, you can do what you want. That's probably not a great idea. The comparables and the background information support, this range will range. So, and for tenants, this is within what would be expected as market rent. Do you have any comments? - And how are you looking to lead that If you're willing to discuss that, are you looking just at market rents? Because obviously, one of the other things that we've debated and we've flagged with MHCOG and our conversations around this is not only the rent review and tribunal process, but obviously coupled with their ban on offers above asking. Yes. Right? So, the double whammy you've got there is you've got a market that is saying, right, have to take market evidence and it has to be more evidence led. But then you've all you're also saying to the market, right, you can't price moderately in the hope that you might might if you're really lucky get an offer above asking you now if if your objective is to secure maximum market value, really, you need to now over list your property price to a level where you are confident you would categorically not achieve more than that. And then whether you achieve that price or it offers down, it's such auction. You don't have that, but you don't have that transparency. You can have a property on market for $2,500 that actually rents for $22. But the market price is $2,5. And then when you're referencing what's on the market for your rent review, you're pulling in data at 25 because you can't see the 22 figure. So that's a really interesting nuance. So what we've done is segregate between asking rents, which are a weaker form of evidence because over time the asking to achieve gap is going to increase because of exactly what you described and then achieved rents. So agents being able to pull through their own achieved rents, so they're in property comparables, we'll launch your partnership with Sprift and a few other providers to be able to pull through other achieved rents. Ultimately, this probably ends up with a data sharing approach, but nowhere near that. So you start with achieved. Good luck with that one, not achieved rents. No one likes to share that data. No one does. I recognise that. So you've got achieved rents either from your own data or from a third party data supplier. I mean, you can potentially establish it through the tenancy deposit schemes because if you know what size deposit they're taking, you can diagnose what the monthly rent is. So, but I don't, I don't, I'm not entirely sure how those data agreements are structured with the deposit schemes. So they operate under, I believe it's called a license or a framework, MHCLG, in order to provide data to any third parties, they require permission from the Ministry of Housing. The Ministry of Housing doesn't believe that any changes are required because there won't be a problem around rent reviews. It's my understanding. Yeah, I think I mean, this is this is another interesting thing we we look at the moment I was telling you before we hopped on this and I've recently become involved with with a new committee that is coming together under the UK PropTech Association, which is focusing on the residential side of PropTech, the provision of residential PropTech products, the space that you and I have operated in for a while now. But I think interestingly, we were talking about, there's some amazing people in that room, it's going to be announced in the coming weeks. But there's some people there who have some incredible jobs and some incredible track records. And one thing that was really interesting was we've had a couple of, we had our first proper meeting the other day, but we obviously had a couple of meetings before that talk about what is this thing going to be if we're doing, you know, there's a lot of busy people sat around that table. And I think the agreement was that we were not just going to have another committee or another advisory board that is just a glorified press release. You know, if we're going to meet, we're going to dedicate time to this, we want to try and achieve something. And we drill down into what initially we think are our two core areas of focus. And one is around the education of the property sector and that is agents, institutional landlords. I think with large institutional operations it is less a requirement but particularly with agency we see educating agents on how to develop a proper tech strategy. Okay. That's one of the challenges because I think you can count on one hand the amount of agents from startups to major corporates who you could walk in the doors of their senior executive branch and go, "Could you explain your tech strategy to me for the next five years?" I don't think there are many people who would go, "Fantastic, I've been working for this, let me pull out my PDF." So that's one area, but the other area is looking at government. And like you said, a lot of the things that government implements, deposit schemes, ombudsman, all this sort of stuff, they are often done on some sort of licensed framework, etc. But what we want to see is that there are core underpinnings to each time those things are granted. So, for example, we want all property related things to adopt UPR ends as a property identifier so that we can clean up data and how it is linked and how it is communicated. - The guy himself would make such a material change and making UPR ends license free for all uses. - Yeah, should be completely free of charge 'cause that does get in the way. But also things like digital first. You know, it wasn't that long ago they implemented the EICR regulations. Now, when that was implemented, that should have come with a caveat that an EICR certificate should be provided first and foremost in a digital format and should be made available through a suitably secure digital framework. Yeah. So that councils, agents, landlords can go, like we do with EPCs. Yeah. Oh, what's the-- it does this property of an EPC? Oh, yes, it does. There it is. Oh, it expires in a year. It's a Bandy, whatever. Yeah. Oh, there's any ICR. Done 18 months ago. It's passed. Everyone's happy. Yeah. So just the underpinning of this stuff so that from a digital perspective, you're creating that framework that enables digital innovation, that enables landlords and letting agents and councils as enforcers to easily access this data that surrounds these things. So go like, cool, that is in place, great, you're good to go. I'm just going to, so wholeheartedly agree, but I think there's an underpinning issue. Yeah. And the underpinning issue is money. So is the government going to invest in such technology portals solutions to make them available? Yeah. Or is the government going to ask the private sector to do it? Yeah. which would work, but provide enough of a commercial incentive for the private sector to do that. And I've been on various working groups over the past 10 years, looking at digitization of elements of the property sector. And I would summarize my understanding thus far as we don't want to build it, we don't want to pay to build it, and we don't want you to monetize any of the information. - But if it's a requirement of tendering, right? So if we look at Corgi and then migrating to gas safety, that is a tender that is done every, I don't know, five, seven years, whatever it is that the government licenses those for, we feel that that should just become an architectural framework requirement of if you're tendering to be the next gas regulator, the next EICR body, the next EPC deliverer, anything that ties into compliance and regulation, to tender for that, your tender must accommodate delivering a solution that encompasses these key elements. And they already, you know, they will already have some elements to that. What we're wanting is to see a digital future as a core architecture of any government tenders and proposals and make sense. So they would price it as part of their tender. Exactly. It would all be wrapped in. non-negotiable, everyone would have to deliver that. Because again, we talk about the wider economy, we talk about what's going on at the moment. There's this massive shift that is coming away from America at the moment with everything that's going on there, with everything that's happening in Europe, looking at their attitudes towards American tech and where it sits within government, architecture, services, supplies, defence. We look at this kind of pivotal moment in AI, LLM, whatever you want to call it, that we're sat in. And where the UK has for a long time been one of the world's major tech powers to some degree in different areas. And if we're not careful, we are going to massively disadvantage ourselves because we are not systemising the architecture to create an environment where innovation, evolution and technology can thrive. Yeah. We're taking a relatively short-term survivalist outlook when strategic long-term investment, the roads we drive on, the tubes or trains we catch, were because of a long-term investment outlook to increase the infrastructure of the country. And that just isn't really happening. And that's, you know, I think that's, that's the thing. I think sometimes they need to be these foundational things that aren't at the mercy of political persuasion. I think that's the other thing, right? Who knows what's going to happen at the next general election, but there is a large, there is a large and strong chance that we're going to have another change of government. Yep. Whatever that formation or entity or structure of that is. And I think, you know, we've seen the damage that has been done to housing through housing being used as a political football by parties, claims and things being said and not done or attempted and not delivered or grandstanding or you know whatever it is but I think we'll never with our political structure unless that changes we're never going to be able to change that but what we can do is ensure that the underlying architecture of industries evolves to create this this non-politicalized kind of platform that everything can still operate on So if we have a change of government in a few years time and it goes right, we're going to repeal this, we're going to add on this, you know, whatever, we've still got the architecture that sits underneath that to be like, oh, cool, the market's pivoting. Great. We've got 10 new startups who are going to pivot and tackle that new political agenda. I think you're poking at a much bigger issue here, which is we look at things because we've been in the property sector for so long. It's a political football. It's about headlines. It's constantly changing and there's no real consolidation and take most of those statements and apply it to transport. Yeah. Energy. Oh, it's not. Defense. It's not unique to and I think this was something actually we talked about recently in the meeting when we were talking about this. We were saying like how do we kind of thinking about it in these compartmentalized ways of housing, transport, blah, blah, blah. Actually, what we need to be filtering back is really as a tech advisory, PropTech covers, as you know, a very broad spectrum of things. We talk about it in a residential housing and to a certain extent commercial property aspect but it underpins and technology. I would argue that every new business now is in part a tech business. Yes. Because whether you're leveraging social media for your marketing or AI for your content or whatever it is. So yeah, I think it's interesting for government, I think it is slightly shifting that narrative away from this is what housing and property needs to this is really what your general approach to all underlying architecture should be. - Yep. - In all sectors, like you said, in transport and housing and environmentalism, whatever it is, there should be these underlying principles of this is the technological kind of architectural framework requirements that sit underneath every single thing. I think what we're missing is, and I realise countries are different from companies, but there are some commonalities. What is the objective? What is our vision for this country, for our society? What is our strategy? So what are we going to do to get there? and what are the individual decisions, the tactics, and the tactics may be slightly different for housing versus defense, but they should all come together with a shared purpose, and I think that's just what we're missing. And if you talk about it in the simplest terms, how do most countries benchmark whether they are being successfully led or not, fundamentally economic growth, right? GDP. GDP, economic growth. And so, We can't, natural resources are finite, we know that. So you can't infinitely increase production, manufacturing, et cetera. But in theory, technology, a digital product, a digital space is relatively unlimited. - Yes. - And so if we're thinking about the long-term economic growth and stability of the UK, It sits a lot around these non-material businesses, fundamentally tech businesses, tech architecture, tech systems that sits underneath all of this. So, I mean, look at this. We started talking about how you review your rent and we're talking about how to fundamentally shift to the architecture of the UK system. It was really funny. I was chatting to Hayley this morning with my wife and she was like, "So what questions have you got prepared So Raj and I was like, "None." She's like, "Well, you mean none." I was like, "I don't come into any of these questions." I'm like, "I know roughly what I'm gonna talk about. We'll talk a little bit about his journey, talk a little bit about what he's up to, but other than that, we'll see where the conversation goes." - Very close. I hope she's doing well. I haven't seen her since we all did the camping trap. - So we did her festival, her arts festival. Yeah, once done. - Well, you're a tired man. - Woo! I was a broke man after that, but yeah, that's something for another pod to talk about. But, so, dude, let's just circle back to what you're doing now, 'cause we will wrap this up now. So, you're doing this early stage, you're kind of locked out at the moment, you've got a bit of a wait list, so if people would like to get on that wait list, what do they need to do? - Go to www.marketrent.co.uk. Click on a button, give us your details, we will be in touch. So I told you we've had 80 inquiries in the first-- - 80 or 18? - 80. - Jesus. - In the first bit, the end of it. We then changed it to please join our wait list and is well over 100, maybe 150 agencies. We will come back to everybody. We're just trying to manage the process through. - And look, I think for a lot of agents that a lot of agents are still wrapping their head around what happened four days ago, first to May, there's still a lot of, You know, everyone's getting their notices out at the moment and kind of bedding in, answering a lot of last minute landlord and tenant questions. Yep. Um, so I don't think there are too many agents desperately needing a solution tomorrow, but I think they are definitely thinking about, you know, what this looks like, what their system and how they're going to track this and evidence Because I think the one common theme that is underpinning all of this new stuff that's coming in and where we're going with AWS and Decent Homes and Meaz, communication documentation. What has been said to whom, when and can you prove it? Audit trials. Yeah, through and through. Dude, it has been a joy. It's nice to have you back in the Resi sector. I know you're still doing your commercial dark side stuff, but it is good to have you back in a Resi room. I look forward to hopefully seeing you back at some of our Resi industry events and sharing fizzy water or two. We can do that. We can make that work. But yeah, it's a joy to have you back, man. Thanks for joining us. Guys, like we said, if you want to find out more, go to marketrent.co.uk and sign up. And yeah, hopefully you've enjoyed today's, got any questions, fire them over, but tune in next time for whoever I'm talking to next time. Bye! Bye!