The rental bidding ban: is your website still advertising illegally?

Of all the changes the Renters' Rights Act brought in, the rental bidding ban is the one most likely to catch an agent out through nothing worse than an old habit. It does not require new systems or new paperwork. It requires you to look hard at the words on your own listings, because several phrases that were ordinary practice for decades became unlawful overnight.

What the rule actually says

From 1 May 2026, a landlord or letting agent must state a proposed rent when a property is advertised or offered, and must not ask for, encourage or accept an offer above that figure. The advertised rent is a ceiling, not an opening position. It applies to the advert, and it applies to what happens afterwards: a tenant who volunteers more to secure the property cannot be taken up on it.

The phrases that are now a problem

Read your own lettings pages as if you were a council officer looking for evidence. The wording that causes trouble is rarely deliberate:

• "Rents from £950 pcm" on a landing page or a development listing. There is no single proposed rent, which is the whole requirement.
• "Offers over" or "OIRO" carried across from the sales side of the business, where it remains perfectly normal.
• "£POA", "price on application" or a blank rent field waiting for someone to ring.
• Rent ranges such as "£950 to £1,050 depending on furnishing", which look helpful and are not compliant.
• "Highest offer secures" or similar urgency language in the description, which is an open invitation to bid.

Where it hides on a website

The listing itself is the obvious place, and usually the one agents check. The copies are what get missed. A rent figure or a stray phrase can also live in your property search filters and their default labels, in the automated description text your system generates, in landing pages for a development or a student patch, in old blog posts and area guides, in the data you push to the portals, and in the email alerts that go out when a property lands. A tidy listing page counts for little if the feed to a portal still carries "offers over" in the description field.

What good looks like

One number, clearly stated, in the same place on every let. Displayed in a way that leaves no ambiguity about the period: £1,000 pcm reads very differently to £1,000 pw, and a tenant misreading it helps nobody. The same figure everywhere the property appears, because a discrepancy between your site and a portal is exactly the sort of thing that gets produced as evidence. If the rent genuinely varies by furnishing or term, that is two listings with two rents, not one listing with a range.

Why this matters more than the fine

Local councils enforce it, and a first breach can bring a civil penalty of up to £7,000, rising to £40,000 for repeat breaches within five years. Those are worth avoiding. But the reputational side bites harder: a landlord choosing between two agents will notice which one has already tidied its adverts, and a tenant who feels they were invited into a bidding war has an easy complaint to make. Getting this right is cheap. Getting it wrong is a phone call you do not want.

A half-hour audit

Search your own site for "from", "offers", "POA" and "OIRO" and read every result. Open five live listings and check the rent appears once, clearly, with the period. Check the same five on each portal you feed and confirm they match. Look at any development or student landing pages, which are the usual home of "rents from". Then check the automated text your system produces, because a template will repeat a mistake across every property you have.

None of this is difficult, but it does need doing deliberately, and it needs the person who controls the listing templates rather than a note to the negotiators. If you would like a second pair of eyes, a free site review will flag the wording and the feed fields that need attention, and our letting agent websites are built so the rent is a single, structured field that flows through to every portal unchanged.