Ben Yarrow

I started Marks Out Of Tenancy in 2015 after a tenancy of my own went badly and I realised there was nowhere to warn the person who moved in next. You can look up a restaurant, a plumber or a second-hand car before you commit. You could not look up the person about to take a month’s rent and a deposit off you, and hold the keys to where you sleep.

Since then the site has collected 10,613 reviews from 2,618 renters across the UK, covering landlords, letting agents, properties and neighbourhoods. Reviews are moderated, checked as coming from genuine tenants, and published anonymously — because the honest ones carry a risk of retaliation.

Why I write these guides

Most renting problems are not really legal problems at the point they start. They are someone not knowing whether the thing that just happened to them is allowed. Whether the landlord can enter without asking. Whether the damp is theirs to fix. Whether that deposit deduction is legitimate.

These 85 guides exist to answer that first question in plain English, before it becomes a dispute. Where something genuinely needs a solicitor, a council enforcement team or Shelter, they say so rather than pretending otherwise.

Where this comes from

• Ten years running a platform that reads renter complaints daily — what actually goes wrong, and how often.
• Renters’ Pulse, a quarterly tenant survey we ran for ten editions from 2023 to 2025, tracking repairs, security of tenure, financial stability and mental health.
• Work funded by Impact on Urban Health, the operating name of Guy’s and St Thomas’ Foundation, developing the platform with low-income renters in Southwark and Lambeth.
• Partnerships with organisations that do the hard end of this work — Justice For Tenants, Safer Renting, Age UK London, the Cardinal Hume Centre and the Renters’ Reform Coalition among them.

A note on what these guides are

They are general information about how renting in the UK works, written for England unless a guide says otherwise — Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland differ, sometimes substantially. They are not legal advice, and they cannot account for what is in your particular tenancy agreement or the specifics of your situation.

If a guide is out of date or wrong, I would genuinely like to know. Tell me and I will correct it.