Data Reveals Landlords Want Letting Agent Support for MTD

Most coverage of MTD frames it as a burden - more admin, more deadlines, more risk. But new research commissioned by Landlord Studio, surveying 500 landlords and letting agents across the UK, tells a more interesting story for letting agents.

It's a story about trust that already exists, a service landlords are already looking for, and a gap that the first agents to move will own.

Landlords already believe letting agents are the answer

When we asked about the role of letting agents in MTD compliance, the results were about as close to consensus as survey research gets:

• 93% agree that letting agents are well-equipped to support landlords with MTD compliance. Out of 500 respondents, only two disagreed.
• 90% agree that letting agents have an important role to play in supporting landlords through the transition.
• 88% agree that letting agents can make managing MTD easier for landlords.

Read those numbers again from a commercial standpoint. Your clients aren't skeptical about whether you can help them with the biggest tax administration change in a generation. They're not waiting to be convinced. The trust (the hardest thing for any business to build), is already there.

And it's well-placed. The most accurate record of a managed landlord's rental income and expenses doesn't sit in their filing cabinet or their accountant's inbox. It sits in your client accounting system. Every rent payment, every management fee, every maintenance deduction is already recorded, categorised and reconciled inside the platform your agency uses every day. MTD is, at its core, a digital record-keeping requirement and for managed properties, you already keep the records.

A service landlords don't know exists

61% of landlords agree that awareness of the support letting agents can provide with MTD is low.

Landlords overwhelmingly believe agents are equipped to help. They believe agents have an important role. They believe agents can make MTD easier. And at the same time, most say that hardly anyone knows this support is available.

There's a fair reason for that. MTD is new for agents too, and many agencies are still working out what an MTD service actually looks like - what to offer, how to deliver it, and where the line sits between helpful support and tax advice.

Others have already put a solution in place but haven't yet made the noise to match: it's mentioned once at sign-up, or buried on a services page, rather than put in front of every landlord who needs it.

Either way,  this isn't a capability gap, and it isn't a trust gap.

The single highest-leverage thing an agency can do about MTD right now is simply to decide what its offer is, how it’s delivering it - and then tell landlords about it, loudly and often.

There's a reason this window matters. The same research found that 97% of respondents are likely to invest in digital tax and compliance tools within the next 12 to 24 months, with meeting MTD requirements and reducing admin time as the leading drivers. Your landlords are going to adopt an MTD solution - that's now close to certain.

The only open question is whether they find it through you, or through an ad, a forum thread or an app store search. One path strengthens the relationship and can create a new revenue line for your agency; the other quietly moves a piece of the landlord relationship somewhere else.

Promoting MTD to your landlord clients

1. ‍Identify who's affected: Start with landlords likely to be over the £50,000 threshold now, multi-property clients and higher-rent portfolios - then flag those who'll be caught at £30,000 in April 2027. Your client accounting data makes this a filtering exercise, not a research project.
2. ‍Start the conversation before the deadline does: A short, plain-English note to affected landlords does most of the work: what MTD requires, when it applies to them, and  crucially  that your agency can help. With the first quarterly deadline on 7 August, a well-timed message now positions you as proactive rather than reactive. Many landlords will hear about their obligations from you before they hear it from HMRC.
3. ‍Make the help concrete: Awareness converts when there's something specific on offer. That might start with education - a guide, a webinar, a checklist. The next step up is pointing landlords to digital record-keeping tools that get them MTD-ready. The most seamless option is a service where your existing client accounting data flows automatically into MTD-compatible software, so landlords review and submit without re-keying anything - and without your team's workflow changing at all. For a full breakdown of these service models and how to price them, see our guide to MTD for letting agents.‍
4. Put it where landlords will see it: The awareness gap isn't closed by a single email. Mention MTD support in your landlord newsletters, on statements, at renewal conversations and on your website. The message is simple and true: the data you need for MTD already exists in our system - and we can connect it for you.

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How do you actually serve landlord clients for MTD?

This is exactly the gap letting agent software like Nexus was built to close.

Nexus connects directly to your existing client accounting platform (including Reapit, PayProp, SME Professional, Alto and LettsPay) and automatically syncs each landlord's rental income, fees and expenses into an HMRC-recognised portal where they review and submit their quarterly updates in a few clicks.

For your team, nothing changes: you continue recording rents and expenses exactly as you do today, and you stay well clear of tax advice. Your only tasks are having the conversation and sending each landlord a unique sign-up link. Landlords subscribe directly, Landlord Studio handles billing and support, and your agency earns a commission on every active subscription - turning a compliance change into a retention tool and a revenue stream in one move.

Landlords already believe you're the right people to help them through MTD. The agencies that win this moment won't be the ones with the most capability - they'll be the ones who told their landlords first.

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Ready to serve MTD for landlords? Book a quick demo and see how Nexus turns the data you already hold into an MTD service your landlords are already looking for.

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