Lede

Most managing agents charge between eight and twenty percent of monthly rent to answer questions a textbook could answer. Holt Agent is the textbook — and the clerk, and the compliance diary, and the forensic accountant who reads the bank statement properly.

Context

The UK private rented sector is under regulatory pressure on four fronts at once. The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 received Royal Assent in October 2025 and begins commencement in May 2026 — Section 21 evictions abolished, all Assured Shorthold Tenancies converted to periodic, rent increases governed by a new statutory route, mandatory PRS Database registration on the way. Scotland already runs its own regime under the Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016, which created the Private Residential Tenancy. Wales operates under the Renting Homes (Wales) Act 2016. Northern Ireland’s framework sits in the Private Tenancies (Northern Ireland) Order 2006 plus the 2022 amendments. Four nations, four sets of notice procedures, four sets of compliance dates.

Layer on Making Tax Digital for Income Tax, mandatory from April 2026 for landlords with qualifying income above £50,000 (threshold drops to £30,000 in 2027 and £20,000 in 2028), and the working landlord is being asked to operate as a small accounting firm and a small law firm simultaneously. The English Private Landlord Survey 2024 counts 2.3 million private landlords in England. Over 150,000 of them exited the market between 2023 and 2025. The ones remaining are the ones who plan to professionalise — and most of them are paying a managing agent £80–£240 per month on a £1,200 flat to absorb the complexity.

Meanwhile tenant vetting is unchanged from 2005. Landlords manually inspect bank statements that anyone can forge in fifteen minutes with a PDF editor. Standard agency referencing costs £20–£50 per applicant and tells the landlord roughly what a payslip already told them.

There is no product on the market that combines tenancy-law expertise across all four nations, document intelligence good enough to catch forged statements, and compliance automation in a single tool that an individual landlord can actually afford.

The problem

A landlord with three properties — one in Edinburgh, one in Cardiff, one in Manchester — operates under three different tenancy regimes. The notice they serve a Scottish tenant is a Notice to Leave under the PRT framework. The notice they serve a Welsh tenant is a contract-holder notice under the Renting Homes (Wales) Act. The notice they serve a Manchester tenant is now Section 8 under the Renters’ Rights Act, with new and reformed grounds for possession. Get the wrong nation, get the wrong form, lose the case on a technicality. Their letting agent charges a percentage of monthly rent to know the difference.

Most of what the agent does is answerable by software. Can I evict a tenant under the new ground 1A? Is my EICR still valid if it’s four years and eleven months old? What’s the notice period for a rent increase in Scotland? Each of those questions is in legislation. The cost of getting an authoritative answer is currently £1,000–£3,000 a year per property — paid not for the answer but for the indemnity that wraps it.

The bank statement problem is worse. A determined tenant can edit a Lloyds PDF to show the salary they wish they had. A landlord with no forensic accounting training reads the document, sees the right balance at the bottom, signs the tenancy. Six months later the standing order bounces because the income was never there. Visual inspection cannot catch any of this — balance discontinuity is invisible to the human eye, round-number anomalies do not register without statistical comparison, and PDF metadata is not something most landlords have ever opened.

The shape of the gap is specific: an individual landlord needs the legal knowledge of a four-jurisdiction property lawyer, the forensic skill of a fraud analyst, the diary discipline of a compliance officer, and a price point under fifty pounds a month. Nothing on the market is that thing.

What we built

Three modules, one product.

Ask Agent is a conversational assistant that knows UK tenancy law across all four nations. The landlord asks a question in plain English — “can I refuse a pet request from a tenant in Glasgow?” — and the system detects the nation from the property’s postcode, loads the relevant legislation (Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016 for that one), and streams a cited answer. Every legal point quotes the specific section. The agent can also generate formal legal documents on command — Section 8 possession notices, Section 13 rent increase notices, tenancy agreements, pet request responses, repair letters, deposit dispute letters — formatted as the document a court would expect to see. A landlord with a verified property portfolio across multiple nations asks the question once and the right Act answers it.

Statement Scanner runs five forensic checks on uploaded bank statements. Balance continuity verifies that each running balance equals the previous balance plus the transaction amount — the single most reliable indicator of manipulation, invisible to visual inspection. Round-number anomaly detection flags statements where an unusual proportion of transactions land on suspiciously round amounts. Duplicate transaction detection identifies repeated entries that suggest copy-paste editing. PDF metadata analysis checks whether the document was created by image editing software rather than a bank’s PDF generator. Missing identifier detection flags incomplete sort codes or missing bank references. Above the authenticity layer sits affordability — the system identifies regular salary credits, calculates monthly averages, scores income stability via coefficient of variation, estimates disposable income after detected commitments, and produces a rent-to-income ratio against the proposed rent. Output is a structured report with a confidence score (0–100), specific flagged concerns at three severity levels, and a verdict: comfortable, marginal, or unaffordable.

Compliance is the diary that does not forget. Eight categories per property — Gas Safety Certificate (annual), EICR (5 years), EPC (10 years), Smoke & CO Alarms (annual check), Deposit Protection (per tenancy), Landlord Registration (varies by nation), Tenancy Statement (Scotland, Wales), Right to Rent (England only). When a landlord adds a property, the system auto-detects the nation from the postcode and creates the relevant compliance items. As certificate dates are entered, the system auto-calculates status: compliant, expiring within 90 days, or expired. Portfolio-level health score on the dashboard.

A fourth module, Tenant Vetter, ships in Phase 2 — combining the Statement Scanner output with structured landlord-reference collection via tokenised email links, identity verification, and right-to-rent checks into a single shareable report card. The recommendation algorithm produces APPROVE / REVIEW / DECLINE based on transparent thresholds (APPROVE requires identity verified, authenticity ≥80, affordability comfortable, positive reference, RTR verified where applicable).

It is a managing agent that does not take a percentage and does not forget anything.

Architecture

The architecture is shaped by two requirements: shared identity with the larger Holt platform, and per-jurisdiction extensibility from day one.

Supabase for the auth + data layer. Agent tables sit on a Supabase project with an agent_* schema namespace, twelve tables in total — profiles, properties, conversations, messages, scans, vettings, references, compliance items, documents, usage counters, subscriptions, audit — with Row-Level Security policies on every one. Authentication runs through Supabase magic-link auth; agent profiles are provisioned on first access rather than via an auth.users trigger, which avoids trigger conflicts as the schema grows. Holt Agent shipped on this stack and has stayed on it; later products in the lab moved onto Neon + Clerk, but the Agent’s auth model and the maturity of its Supabase schema didn’t justify a migration.

RLS for reads, service role for writes. The browser client uses the anon key with SELECT-only RLS policies. All mutations route through Next.js API routes using the Supabase service-role client. The API route is the sole authorisation boundary, which simplifies audit and keeps client-side surface area minimal.

RAG over a chunked knowledge base. The “Renters’ Rights Bible” — a structured corpus covering the Renters’ Rights Act 2025, Housing Act 1988, Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016, Renting Homes (Wales) Act 2016, and Private Tenancies (Northern Ireland) Order 2006 — is chunked by legal topic into roughly sixty to eighty chunks of 500–1,000 tokens each. Chunks are embedded into Supabase pgvector. At query time the top three to five chunks by cosine similarity are retrieved and injected into the system prompt alongside a jurisdiction preamble. Token cost per request dropped by approximately 80% versus the original full-Bible injection. The same pipeline scales to US per-state tenancy law without architecture changes — the jurisdiction field is a flexible string, not a UK-only enum.

Vercel AI Gateway routes every LLM call. This gives per-model cost tracking, rate limiting per subscription tier, and provider failover. Anthropic Claude Sonnet handles the Ask Agent chat (streaming). Claude with vision handles the Statement Scanner OCR — every transaction extracted into structured JSON before authenticity checks run.

waitUntil() for post-stream writes. After a chat response finishes streaming, the function wraps message persistence and usage-counter increments in Vercel’s waitUntil() so the serverless function does not terminate before the writes complete.

Stripe powers the four-tier billing surface — Free, Starter (£9/mo), Pro (£19/mo), Portfolio (£39/mo). Monthly usage counters reset automatically. Free-tier limits are enforced at the API level with clear upgrade prompts.

How it works (the short version)

• Nation detection from property postcode; the right Act loads automatically across all four UK jurisdictions
• Vision-model OCR extracts every transaction from a statement PDF before the five authenticity checks run
• RAG knowledge base chunked by legal topic, retrieved per query — 80% token-cost reduction, US expansion is a configuration change
• Document generation — Section 8, Section 13, tenancy agreements, pet responses, repair letters, deposit dispute letters
• Compliance tracking — eight categories per property, nation-aware, auto-status calculation
• Stack — Next.js 16 with Turbopack, Supabase Postgres + pgvector, Supabase Auth, Vercel AI Gateway, Anthropic Claude Sonnet

Live behaviour today

Holt Agent is live at holtagent.com, running on four billing tiers from free to £39 a month. Phase 1 (Ask Agent across all four nations, Statement Scanner with authenticity + affordability, property and compliance tracking, document generation, Stripe billing) is shipped. Phase 2 (the pgvector RAG migration, the Tenant Vetter pipeline with email-based landlord references, bulk statement scanning up to ten files per batch) is shipped.

Phase 3 is in active build: tenant verification links (one link the landlord sends to the tenant, who completes identity, income and reference in a single flow), TrueLayer Open Banking integration for verified-at-source income, and the public Portfolio-tier REST API at /api/v1/ with API-key auth and 100 req/min rate limit. Experian Connect for soft credit search is pending commercial agreement.

Unit economics: at the Pro tier (£19/month), a landlord on a £1,200/month property saves £77–£221 a month versus the 8–20% managing-agent fee. The product pays for itself inside the first month.

What’s next

• Phase 3 ship (Q3 2026). Tenant verification links go live. TrueLayer Open Banking income verification replaces document upload for the Pro and Portfolio tiers. Portfolio API opens to the first cohort of professional-investor accounts.
• Holt account linking (Q4 2026). OAuth link between Holt Agent and the Holt marketplace. Shared billing bundles. Agent becomes the acquisition funnel for the trust marketplace — landlords who self-manage on Agent and need a new tenant are upsold into Holt’s verified matching layer.
• US jurisdiction expansion (H1 2027). Per-state tenancy law added to the knowledge base — California, New York first. The RAG pipeline, the nation detection, and the system prompt builder all support the new jurisdictions through configuration; the architecture was built for this on day one.

Tech stack

• Framework — Next.js 16 with App Router and Turbopack
• Language — TypeScript end-to-end
• Styling — Tailwind CSS, Fraunces / DM Sans / JetBrains Mono
• Auth — Supabase Auth (magic link)
• Database — Supabase Postgres with Row-Level Security
• Vector store — Supabase pgvector for RAG over UK tenancy legislation
• AI — Vercel AI Gateway routing Anthropic Claude Sonnet (chat streaming, vision OCR)
• Storage — Supabase Storage for bank statements and generated documents
• Billing — Stripe (four-tier subscription model)
• Email — Resend (transactional + landlord reference requests)
• Hosting — Vercel

Status

Live at holtagent.com on four billing tiers from free to forty pounds a month. Phase 1 and Phase 2 shipped; Phase 3 — tenant verification links, TrueLayer Open Banking income proof, the public API — in build.

Why this matters for Bento Labs

Holt Agent is the wedge in front of Holt. It is the smaller, faster product that gets a landlord into the Bento Labs ecosystem before the full trust marketplace is ready for them. In the bento metaphor — different compartments of life, one philosophy — Agent is the side dish that proves the main course is worth waiting for. The architectural choice to share the database, the auth, and the brand with the larger platform is the same compartment logic at the engineering level: ship the smaller piece, prove the data model, scale it up.