From 90 minutes to 90 seconds: automating referencing and lettings admin

Every letting agent reading this has lived the same Tuesday morning. A tenancy agreed at the weekend, a landlord chasing on WhatsApp, a prospective tenant who hasn’t checked their email, and a negotiator juggling it all while trying to get to a viewing at noon. The bottleneck is rarely a shortage of intent — it’s a shortage of automation. The same data gets typed into three different systems, chasing emails go out manually, and referencing results arrive when they feel like it. None of this is inevitable.

Why the manual approach is getting more expensive

The cost of staying manual isn’t just measured in hours. Right to Rent enforcement has tightened sharply. Civil penalties first-breach fines rose from £1,000 per occupier (and £80 per lodger) to up to £10,000 and £5,000 respectively from 13 February 2024, with repeat breaches now reaching £20,000 per occupier (Propertymark). Enforcement has followed: penalties issued to landlords and agents exceeded £4.2 million since late 2024, compared with around £596,400 in the comparable preceding period — roughly a sevenfold increase — with the number of civil penalties climbing from 235 to more than 375 (Landlord Today, 2025). A missed check or a miskeyed passport number isn’t just embarrassing — it’s a liability that lands with you, not the landlord.

Then there’s the void cost. Tenant referencing platform Goodlord cites research putting the average revenue lost per property through slow referencing at £970 (Goodlord). Across several transactions a month, that’s a meaningful drain that never shows up as a line item. And with the Renters’ Rights Act now in force — all new private tenancies in England becoming assured periodic tenancies from 1 May 2026, with a written statement of terms and a prescribed Information Sheet that must be evidenced as served — the compliance paperwork per tenancy has increased, not decreased.

Meanwhile, the administrative load on agents is widely acknowledged as the sector’s pressure point: nearly half of agencies (47%) are now experimenting with AI specifically to ease their workload (Goodlord, State of the Lettings Industry 2025). Bolting new compliance steps onto manual workflows is not a solution.

Where the time actually goes

The problem isn’t referencing itself — it’s everything around it. Think through a standard tenancy progression:

1. Applicant details taken over the phone or email and entered into the CRM.
2. Reference order placed with a provider — often by copying the same details across again.
3. Chasing calls or emails to the applicant when forms aren’t completed.
4. Results received, reviewed, and communicated to the landlord.
5. Agreement drafted, often from a template that still has the last tenant’s name in it if you’re unlucky.
6. Agreement sent, chased, signed, returned.
7. Right to Rent check documented separately.
8. Move-in monies collected and reconciled.

Each of those steps involves a human touching a keyboard. Most involve either re-entering data that already exists somewhere else, or sending a message that a system could have sent automatically five minutes after the trigger event. The tenant referencing process itself is often not the slowest part — it’s waiting on applicants. Automated reminders, sent at the right intervals without a negotiator having to remember, close that gap.

What built-by-agents automation actually looks like

PropertyGoose was built by people who managed lettings portfolios, which means the workflow is shaped around how agencies actually operate — not how a product team imagined they might.

When a reference is ordered, the applicant receives a direct link to complete their own information. No phone call required from your side. Our processing team works seven days a week and the typical turnaround is around 48 hours — stated conservatively, because the real variable is how quickly applicants engage, not how quickly we process once we have everything. In practice, a reference ordered on Friday morning will often be back before Monday. See the full referencing process and what we cover for the detail on each stage.

Once a reference completes, a tenancy agreement can follow without anyone re-keying a single field. Applicant data flows into the agreement automatically. That’s where the contrast in the title comes from: progressing a fully-referenced tenancy into a pre-populated agreement, ready to review and dispatch for e-signature, takes seconds rather than the better part of an hour spent opening a Word template, finding and replacing the tenant name and address six times, saving as PDF, and attaching it to an email.

The same logic extends to Right to Rent. Rather than keeping a separate spreadsheet of expiry dates and hoping someone catches them, compliant ID verification is handled as part of the referencing workflow — with the audit trail retained automatically. That’s the safeguard against the kind of enforcement action that’s been accelerating since 2024.

The Renters’ Rights Act compliance layer

From 1 May 2026, every new private tenancy in England is an assured periodic tenancy. Fixed terms in new agreements no longer have effect. Under Section 12 of the Act, landlords and agents must give the tenant a written statement of the key terms before the agreement is signed, and you must be able to evidence that the prescribed Information Sheet was served — most landlords and agents needed to have done so by 31 May 2026 (GOV.UK Information Sheet 2026; NRLA). Note that emailing or texting a link to the PDF does not count as valid service — the document itself must be sent or handed over.

Agents still issuing agreements from Word templates are about to find out whether those templates have been updated. Agents using a digital workflow, where agreements are generated from a compliant, maintained template and served with the required documents, are already covered. That distinction matters when Section 13 rent-review processes, deposit rules, and possession grounds all flow from whether the initial paperwork was correct.

Keeping up with legislative change is part of what you’re paying for with a modern referencing and tenancy platform. See how PropertyGoose handles RRA-compliant offer and tenancy forms.

How the numbers stack up

PropertyGoose pricing starts at £14 per reference on pay-as-you-go (with no commitment), reducing towards £10 per reference at volume on the 12-month plan. Tenancy agreements are included in the annual Full Lifecycle plan at £29.50 per tenancy per year. There are no setup or onboarding fees, and white-labelling is included so you use it under your own brand. All prices are plus VAT.

For a busy agency, the combined referencing and agreements cost is straightforward to model against the time it replaces. If you can progress a tenancy in seconds rather than the best part of an hour, you’re handing time back to your team — time that gets used on viewings, landlord relationships, and growing the managed portfolio, rather than copying and pasting.

The practical starting point

The agencies that get most out of automation aren’t the ones that overhauled everything in a week. They’re the ones that identified the single highest-friction step — usually either chasing applicants for referencing documents or recreating tenancy agreements from scratch — and plugged in a better process there first.

If referencing is that step for you, compare how PropertyGoose works against your current provider and check whether the turnaround, pricing, and compliance coverage match what you need. You can place a reference directly or book a conversation if you’d rather walk through the agent workflow first.

The 90-minute tenancy progression isn’t something to be proud of. It’s a problem that has a solution.

Craig Ryder, PropertyGoose