Landlord responsibilities with a letting agent explained
Paying an agent twelve percent a month feels like paying someone else to carry the risk. In England, the certificates still need to be in date, and the letter a council sends still has your name on it.
Last reviewed 27 July 2026 · England
A management agreement covers finding tenants, collecting rent and arranging repairs. Landlords routinely read compliance into that list as well, on the reasonable-sounding assumption that a service charging this much must include it. The certificates themselves say otherwise: they are issued in the landlord’s name, and in England that is also whose name a council writes to.
Who the law actually names
Gas, electrical and alarm duties in England fall on the landlord by definition, not on whoever happens to manage the property day to day. An agent can be instructed to book the engineer, chase the electrician or confirm the alarms are fitted, and a good one does all three without being asked twice. None of that moves the duty. It only moves who does the phoning.
| Duty | Who the law holds | What an agent typically does |
|---|---|---|
| Gas Safety (CP12) | The landlord named on the certificate | Books the engineer, if instructed to |
| EICR | The landlord | Arranges the inspection, if instructed to |
| Smoke and CO alarms | The landlord | Confirms alarms are fitted at check-in |
| HMO or selective licence | The named licence holder, usually the landlord | May apply on the landlord's behalf |
What “fully managed” leaves out
Fully managed describes a service level, not a legal transfer. Read the actual management agreement rather than the marketing page it was sold on: some name specific compliance tasks with dates attached, others promise only to “arrange as required”, which covers the agent the moment nothing was formally required of them. A landlord who has never read that clause finds out what it says at the same moment a council does.
Even where the agreement is specific, the agent’s failure to act is a private matter between landlord and agent. It plays no part in a council’s decision to issue a penalty, which under the Renters’ Rights Act can run to up to £40,000 for an electrical safety breach and up to £6,000 for gas, addressed to the landlord regardless of who the landlord paid to handle it.
Where the gap actually opens
The failure mode is rarely an agent who ignores compliance outright. It is a change of staff at the agency, a certificate renewed under the previous tenancy that nobody diaried forward, or an assumption on both sides that the other one is tracking the date. Neither party notices until a tenant complaint or a routine check brings it to the surface, by which point the certificate has usually been missing for months, not days.
A landlord with their own record of every renewal date is protected from that gap whether or not the agent’s own tracking holds up. A landlord relying entirely on the agent’s word finds out how good that tracking was at the same time the council does.
What to check with your agent now
- Ask for the actual renewal date on file for each certificate, not just confirmation that one exists.
- Ask who receives the renewal reminder: the agent, you, or both.
- Get your own copy of every certificate rather than relying on the agent to produce one on request.
- Keep your own record even with an agent in place. CertSorted holds every certificate and its renewal date on one screen, so the record exists independently of whoever is managing the property this year.