About havelo
The UK private rented sector is being rewritten under landlords' feet. The Renters Reform Bill, Section 24, EPC C uplift, selective licensing, the planned end of fixed-term tenancies. Layered on top: a media narrative that treats every landlord as the villain of someone else's story.
havelo is for the 94% of landlords who own four properties or fewer. The dentist with a flat she rents to a junior doctor. The retired teacher with two terraces in his hometown. The couple who put their savings into a buy-to-let instead of a pension. People who don't have a property manager on payroll, can't afford the legal team a corporate landlord uses and can't keep up with a regulatory book that changes every quarter.
The premise
Law is tightening
Section 21 phased out. Mandatory landlord registration on the way. Decent Homes Standard for the PRS. EPC band C looming. Each one is defensible in isolation, the cumulative weight is significant.
Tax is shifting
Section 24 turned mortgage interest from an expense into a 20% credit. Higher SDLT on second properties. The single biggest tax change for a generation, and most landlords absorbed it without raising rents.
Sentiment has soured
"Landlord" is shorthand for villain in much of the press. The reality (a sector kept afloat by 2.6 million private individuals, not anonymous corporations) gets quietly skipped over.
Costs are climbing
Mortgage rates, energy upgrades, gas safety, EICR every five years, possible HMO licence fees, mandatory ombudsman. None of this is going away. Letting agents charge more to manage it. Many landlords just self-manage and hope.
What havelo is
One workspace for the whole job. Properties, tenants, applicant referencing, contracts, repairs, contractor dispatch, compliance reminders and a UK-grounded AI assistant that knows the law and where every feature lives in the app. Designed so a self-managing landlord with three properties can do, in an hour a week, what an agency would charge them 10% of rent to do badly.
Built for the 94%
Most UK landlords own four or fewer properties. Tools built for big institutions don't fit. So we didn't build one.
UK-first, by default
ASTs, Section 13, Section 8, deposit schemes, EICR, EPC, HMO licences, Renters Reform Bill changes (when in force). Not a US tool wearing a UK skin.
Independent
We don't take a cut of rent. We don't sell your data. We don't push you towards an agency we secretly own. Subscription product, end of story.
What we're not
That's important to say out loud. A good landlord and a good tenant want the same things: a property that's safe and well-maintained, rent paid on time, communication that's clear, problems solved before they get expensive. The platform's tenant portal, repair-reporting flow and applicant experience are designed with the tenant in mind because that's what works for everyone.
What we are against is the assumption that every individual landlord is a corporate adversary in disguise. Most aren't. They're people who put their savings into bricks because they couldn't trust a pension, and who now find every move regulated by people who've never had to chase £4,000 of arrears through a county court.
If you're a tenant reading this
Hi. We hope your landlord uses havelo, because if they do, your repair report gets to a contractor faster, your deposit is protected on time, your right-to-rent check is properly recorded and your communication is in one place. You'll also get a tenant portal of your own (no charge to you, ever) so you can see the status of any open repairs without sending a 9pm WhatsApp.
How we got here
havelo started as a spreadsheet. Then a nicer spreadsheet. Then a notebook of Section 21 dates. Then a folder of CP12s, a stack of EICR PDFs, a screenshot of a tenant's WhatsApp message about damp, and a calendar reminder that the EPC was due in eight months. It was the way most landlords manage: a low-grade administrative drone that fills evenings and weekends.
We built havelo to put all of it in one place. To turn that drone down. To make compliance and tenant-management feel less like a second job and more like a thing you check on a Tuesday morning with a coffee. To give individual landlords the same operational quality a property manager charges 10% of rent to deliver.
We didn't build it to be a unicorn. We built it because we needed it ourselves.
What we believe
Private landlords are infrastructure.
5 million UK households rent from one. Squeezing them out doesn't fix housing, it just changes who owns the same homes.
Compliance shouldn't be a memory test.
Gas safety, EICR, deposit deadlines. The penalty for forgetting is huge. The software should remember for you.
AI should know UK law.
Generic chatbots think 'lease' and quote California. Our assistant is grounded in the Housing Act and stops where a solicitor should start.
Tenants are part of the system.
A tenant who can self-serve a repair report is a tenant who isn't messaging you at 11pm. Everyone wins.
Honest pricing.
Free for one property forever. Pro for five. Portfolio for unlimited. One free trial of Portfolio per account, lifetime. No card, no hidden discounts that vanish.
Plain English.
If you can't say it at a pub, don't put it in the product.