Your agency is about to get a lot more phone calls: how to handle the post-RRA surge in tenant and landlord enquiries

It has been three weeks since the Renters’ Rights Act went live, and agency phone lines are busier than they have been in years. Tenants are calling about their new rights. Landlords are calling about their vanishing ones. And everyone wants answers now.

This is not a temporary spike. The volume of inbound communication to letting agents and property managers was always going to increase once the biggest change to English tenancy law in 30 years came into force. The question is whether your agency is set up to handle it.

Why the calls have increased

Three groups of people all have questions at the same time.

Tenants want to know about pet requests, rent increase challenges, their right to two months’ notice, what the Information Sheet they just received actually means, and whether their landlord can still evict them.

Landlords want to know how to get possession of their property now Section 21 is gone, how to increase rent using Section 13, what the new notice periods are, what happens with their existing S21 notices, and whether they should sell up.

Contractors and local authorities are in the mix too. Building safety requirements, EICR follow-ups, and gas safety inspections are generating their own communication traffic.

The result is a significant increase in inbound calls, emails, and messages at a time when your team is already busier than usual managing the operational transition.

The cost of missing these calls

Every unanswered call or slow email response carries a cost.

A landlord who cannot get through to their agent starts questioning whether to switch to a competitor. A tenant who does not get a timely response to a legitimate question escalates to the local authority or a housing advice service, which can trigger an investigation. A contractor who cannot confirm an appointment delays a safety certificate, which puts your compliance at risk.

Letting agencies typically lose two to three landlords per quarter through poor communication. In a period of high anxiety like this, that number can double. At an average management fee of £150 per month per property, losing even five landlords costs £9,000 per year in recurring revenue.

The maths is clear: handling calls well right now is not just good service, it is revenue protection.

The top 10 questions your team should be ready to answer

Based on the most common queries agencies have reported since 1 May, prepare templated answers for:

1. Can my landlord still evict me? (Short answer: only through Section 8 with specific grounds.)
2. How do I request a pet? (Written request, 28-day response window.)
3. My landlord wants to increase my rent. Can they? (Only via Section 13, once per year, two months’ notice.)
4. I received an Information Sheet. What do I need to do? (Nothing. It is for your information.)
5. I served a Section 21 before May. Is it still valid? (Only if court proceedings are issued by 31 July 2026.)
6. How do I regain possession of my property now? (Section 8, using the appropriate ground.)
7. Can I still sell my rental property with tenants in it? (Yes, and Ground 1A provides a possession route for sale.)
8. My tenant wants a pet and I do not want to allow it. (You need a reasonable, property-specific reason to refuse.)
9. What is the Written Statement of Terms? (A prescribed document for new tenancies from 1 May.)
10. Do I need to do anything about my existing tenancy agreement? (No changes needed to the agreement itself, but serve the Information Sheet by 31 May.)

Write clear, two-to-three sentence answers for each of these. Make them available to every team member. Pin them to a shared document, stick them on the wall, load them into your CRM. The faster your team can answer these confidently, the fewer callbacks, complaints, and escalations you deal with.

Practical fixes for the surge

Triage your inbound communication

Not every call needs a senior negotiator. Categorise enquiries:

• Maintenance requests: route to your maintenance coordinator or automated logging system.

• Compliance questions (RRA-related): route to whoever in your team has been briefed on the new legislation.
• Rent queries: route to your accounts or property management team.
• Viewing and letting enquiries: route to your lettings team.

If a receptionist can identify the category and route the call correctly, the right person answers it the first time. No callbacks needed.

Send proactive landlord updates

Do not wait for your landlords to call and ask what is going on. Send a bulk communication now covering:

• What has changed since 1 May.
• What your agency is doing about it.
• What the landlord needs to do (very little, if you are managing it for them).
• How to reach you if they have specific questions.

One proactive email to 200 landlords can prevent 50 inbound phone calls. That is not an exaggeration. Most landlords just want reassurance that their agent is on top of it. Give them that reassurance before they have to ask.

Send proactive tenant communication

Alongside the statutory Information Sheet, send tenants a plain-English summary of what has changed and what it means for them. Answer the common questions before they are asked.

If a tenant reads your summary and understands that their tenancy is continuing as normal, their rights have expanded, and they do not need to do anything right now, they will not call. That is the goal.

Use templated responses

For emails, WhatsApp messages, and web enquiries, draft standard responses for the top 10 questions listed above. Your team should be able to respond to the majority of post-RRA queries in under two minutes using a template, with a personalised opening line.

This is not about being impersonal. It is about being fast and accurate. A tenant would rather get a correct answer in two hours than a personalised but vague response in two days.

Where AI communication tools fit

This is where automated communication starts earning its keep.

An AI receptionist can answer the most common tenant and landlord questions immediately, in multiple languages, 24 hours a day. It can categorise the enquiry, log it in your case management system, and route it to the right team member if it needs a human response.

For agencies managing hundreds of properties, this is the difference between scaling your response capacity and hiring temporary staff.

OdjoAI’s AI receptionist is built specifically for property management teams. It handles inbound calls, answers common questions using your agency’s policies, logs every interaction as a case, sends follow-up communications to landlords and tenants, and works in over 80 languages. During a period of high inbound volume like this, it means no call goes unanswered and no enquiry falls through the cracks.

If your phone lines have been ringing non-stop since 1 May, this is worth looking at. Book a demo at odjoai.com to see how it handles the post-RRA surge in practice.

The bigger picture

The agencies that communicate well through this transition will retain their landlords and win new ones. Landlords talk to each other. If one landlord’s agent sent a clear, proactive update and another landlord’s agent has not returned their calls in a week, the second landlord is already shopping around.

Tenants talk too. A tenant who gets a fast, clear answer to their pet request feels well-managed. A tenant who gets silence for three weeks escalates. The cost of poor communication is always higher than the cost of good systems.

The Renters’ Rights Act is the new normal. The call volume will settle eventually, but it will settle at a higher baseline than before, because the legislation gives tenants more reasons to contact their agent and gives landlords more reasons to need guidance.

Build the systems to handle it now, and you will not just survive the surge. You will come out of it with a stronger portfolio.