Simon Lambert

They're going to be limited to once a year.

Now, this was something that pretty much happened anyway, because you came to the end of your fixed-term contract, and then you were offered the chance to renew, and maybe that was when the landlord put up the rent.

But they're only going to be able to be done once a year, and tenants will get more rights to challenge them if they are seen to be excessive compared to market value increases, right?

And also what's important here is the extra level of protection that tenants have in that landlords now won't be able to just easily chuck them out because they're challenging the rent increase.

There also won't be any more bidding wars.

So basically the asking rent is the price and you won't find a situation where in hot demand areas you've got the letting agent getting bids from different tenants to try and get in there.

It's going to be much harder for landlords to say that they don't want people to have pets, for example.

It's not going to be a complete you must allow people to have pets, but they're going to have to give a very good reason.

And they're not allowed to discriminate against people on housing benefit or people with children.

And so on.

So there's a big upgrade to renters rights.

The flip side is that this is effectively another crackdown, more red tape on landlords.

And we've already seen a scenario where potentially, you know, some people have been moved out of their properties before this kicked in.

And also the other really important thing to remember is this kicks in today, but it doesn't just kick in for new tenancies from today.

It kicks in for all existing tenancies.

So every renter now has these rights, whether they signed up to their tenancy from today or whether they signed up to it a week ago or a year ago.

Well, firstly, to tackle your first point on the letting agents and this being someone's home, I think that's actually a very good point.

And it's something that you picked up on there that's quite important.

And I would expect you to because, obviously, you've spent quite a long time renting properties.

Yeah.