Tenant Fee Act - Property Portals

Tenant Fee Act

The Tenant Fee Act is coming into effect on the 1st of June 2019 (1st of September in Wales). To help you display the information required by the new legislation on property portals, we have added a new way of entering this information.

As part of the legislation, you are required to display the following information for every property in England that is uploaded to a property portal:

• Permitted payments
• Details of your membership and name of the redress scheme
• Details of your membership and name of any client money protection (CMP) scheme

Agents advertising Welsh properties for let must be a member of Rent Smart Wales and will have to publish details of their CMP scheme on their website. When The Rent Homes (Fees etc) (Wales) Act comes into force later this year, you will also have to include details of your CMP scheme and membership of Rent Smart Wales on property portals.

Service Type

A new tab has been added to your Service Types where you can enter the information. The editor itself is the same editor used for sending emails, which means you will be able to format the content as you see fit.

The HTML editor under the new "Portal Administration Fees" tab on Service Type. The content is the guide text provided by Rightmove

To add the required information, go to Object Types > Service Types.

Or, alternatively, search for "Service Types" in the quick search and select "Show the Service Types".

Content Restrictions

You can include a link to a website in the content, but the URL will not link away when displayed on the property portals. This is a restriction put in place by the property portals themselves.

There is a 4,000 character limit.

Formatting is allowed, including tables (Which can be inserted using the HTML editor provided).

If you are pasting your content from Word (Or other word processors) you must paste the text without formatting. The simplest method is to paste your content into Notepad before pasting it into agentOS. If you fail to do this, you will receive errors from Rightmove and your listings won't be updated.

There are no issues if you type your content straight into the editor on agentOS.

Welsh Agents

To our Welsh clients, we advise that you enter fee information (Generic or specific) into the new field on Service Types as we have had to change the way in which fees are sent to the property portals.

Previously, tenancy auto charges were sent up to property portals, but due to the legislation changes, we have had to change what populates this field in the property feeds.