THE LANDLORD DATABASE IS COMING. HERE’S WHAT STOCKPORT AND CHESHIRE LANDLORDS NEED TO KNOW BEFORE DECEMBER
If you’ve been letting a property in Stockport, South Manchester or anywhere across Cheshire this year, you’ll already know the Renters’ Rights Act turned the rulebook upside down back in May. Section 21 is gone, every tenancy is now a rolling one, and you can only put the rent up once a year through a proper Section 13 notice. If that’s new to you, where have you been because it’s already live.
What a lot of landlords haven’t clocked yet is phase two, and it’s coming fast. From 15 December 2026, the government opens registration for the new Private Rented Sector Database, a national register every landlord in England will eventually need to be on. It’s rolling out region by region rather than all at once, starting in the West Midlands, with the rest of the country following through 2027. We don’t have Greater Manchester or Cheshire’s exact date yet, but the direction of travel is clear: this is coming to every landlord, not just the ones in the first wave.
Here’s why it’s worth getting ahead of rather than waiting for your letter through the door. Once registration opens in your area, you’ll have a set deadline to get every rental property on the database (West Midlands landlords have been given until March 2027, with a final national cut-off of November 2027 for everyone). Miss it and the penalties aren’t a slap on the wrist, they go up to £7,000 per breach. More to the point for anyone managing a difficult tenancy: once the database is live, courts won’t grant certain possession orders unless your landlord and property entries are active on it. No database entry effectively means no route through the courts if you ever need one.
There’s also a running cost to build into your numbers now. Registration isn’t a one-off, it’s an annual renewal at £65 per property. If you’ve got a few properties across Stockport and South Manchester, that adds up, so it’s worth factoring into next year’s budget rather than discovering it as a surprise.
So what should you actually do between now and whenever your region’s date lands? Honestly, not a huge amount yet, the full registration system isn’t open. But three things are worth sorting now so you’re not scrambling later. First, make sure your gas safety certificates, EPCs and electrical reports are current and easy to find, because the database will ask for them. And third, if you’ve got a portfolio spread across different local authorities, start a simple list of every property, because when the regional rollout reaches you, you’ll want to move fast rather than hunting for addresses and tenancy dates under pressure.
I’ll be tracking the rollout as the government confirms more regions and will flag it the moment anything affecting the North West is announced. In the meantime, if you want a second pair of eyes on where your paperwork stands, or just want someone to talk you through what’s actually changed since May, that’s exactly the sort of thing I help landlords with across Stockport, South Manchester and Cheshire. Get in touch and we’ll go through it together.
