For most landlords this landed as a loss of control. The end date you used to plan around (whether for a sale, a refurbishment, a family move, or simply the option to re-let at market rate) no longer exists in a standard tenancy. The levers you used to have when a tenancy went wrong are shorter, slower, and more procedural.
The Act has a boundary, and it is worth understanding exactly where it sits.
What the Act actually covers
The Renters' Rights Act applies to assured tenancies. An assured tenancy can only exist where the tenant is an individual person, occupying the property as their only or principal home, within certain rent limits.
Change any one of those elements and the tenancy falls outside the Act entirely. The exclusion that matters most to landlords is the first one: a company cannot be an assured tenant. When you let your property to a company rather than a person, the agreement is a contractual tenancy governed by what you and the company sign, not by the Housing Act, and not by the Renters' Rights Act.
This is not a workaround someone found last year. Company lets have sat outside the assured tenancy regime since the Housing Act 1988 was drafted. What changed in May is what that exclusion is worth.
What a company let gives you that a standard tenancy no longer can
A fixed term with a real end date. Twelve months means twelve months. The agreement ends when it says it ends, and what happens next (whether renewal, renegotiation, or handing back the keys) is whatever the contract says. No possession grounds, no tribunal, no open-ended tail.
Rent set by contract, not by statute. Under the Act, rent increases for individual tenancies are limited to once a year, on two months' notice, with a tenant right to challenge at tribunal. In a company let, the rent and any review mechanism are simply terms you agree.
A counterparty with something to lose. A company tenant with a trading history, public accounts, and a reputation attached to its name behaves differently from an anonymous applicant. And if you want personal recourse behind the company, a director's guarantee gives you a named individual to pursue, without dragging the tenancy itself back inside the Act.
Rent that arrives whether the property is booked or not. In the case of a serviced-accommodation operator like us, the company pays a fixed monthly rent to the owner regardless of whether the apartment is booked out that month. The operator carries the occupancy risk. For a landlord used to void periods and the arithmetic of "80 percent occupancy is good enough", the certainty is a genuine step up.
Who actually rents this way
Companies do not need somewhere to live. They rent residential property for business reasons: housing relocating employees, accommodating projects, or (as in our case) operating the property as serviced accommodation for vetted, short-stay guests.
That last model is the one we run at Lush Homes. We lease apartments from London owners on fixed twelve-month company agreements, pay the rent every month whether the property is booked or not, and host guests to a standard the property's own listing history can verify.
The operator you pick is the entire game
A company let is only as protective for you as the company on the other side. The Act cleared a legal space. The operator you fill it with determines what actually happens inside your property for the next twelve months.
The failure mode is not hard to picture. A rent-to-rent operator signs a twelve-month lease, packs the property with two hundred short-stay guests, does not clean between them, does not respond to complaints, and hands the keys back on the last day of the term with a flat that needs six weeks of remedial work. Company let, technically compliant, catastrophic outcome.
The alternative is an operator who runs the property the way we run our own home in North Greenwich. That means professional cleaners between every stay, not a mate with a hoover. Guests vetted before they arrive, not accepted sight unseen. Damage identified the day it happens, not the day the operator hands the keys back. The property inspected by us at regular intervals, with photographs, so the state of it is a matter of record and not memory.
The tell for an operator worth working with is the specificity of what they will show you before you sign. Ask to see the standard cleaning specification. Ask to see the guest vetting process. Ask to see photographs of a property they have run for a year. Ask what the wear-and-tear pattern looks like after twelve months of their operation. An operator who can produce all four in the room is one who has thought about your property as a business asset, not a placeholder. Our earlier piece on the wear-and-tear advantage of well-run short-lets covers the compound effect over five to ten years.
The honest part
We would rather lose a deal than gloss over this, so here is what a company let does not do.
It does not switch off your other obligations. If your flat is leasehold, the head lease still governs what use is permitted, and some leases require the freeholder's consent. If the property is mortgaged, your lender's terms still apply, and some lenders want to approve a company let. This is a conversation to have early, not after signing. Buildings insurance needs to reflect the actual use. None of this is difficult, but all of it needs doing properly.
It does not make the operator's conduct irrelevant. The Act extended rent repayment orders to superior landlords and company directors precisely to catch rent-to-rent arrangements done badly: subletting without permission, skipping safety obligations, hiding the model from the owner. That change protects you, and it is why the agreement you sign should say in plain words what the company will do in the property. Ours does. If an operator's contract is vague about the use, that vagueness is the warning.
And it is not a decision to take on a blog post alone. We are operators, not solicitors. Have your own adviser look at the agreement before you sign. Any operator worth partnering with will encourage exactly that.
Where this leaves you
If you own a flat in London and the loss of the fixed term has changed the maths for you, our list-your-property page explains how our agreements work, what we check before we take a property on, and what we pay.
The Act rewrote the rules for letting to people. It left the rules for letting to companies exactly where they were. For a certain kind of landlord, that difference is now the most valuable clause in property.
Lush Homes leases and manages serviced apartments in London. This article is general information, not legal advice. Take your own advice before entering any tenancy agreement.