Three deadlines have passed since May and nobody sent you a reminder

Section 21 went on 1 May. Fixed terms went with it. Every tenancy in my house in Gloucester is periodic now, which in practice means any of my tenants can hand in two months' notice in the middle of February and leave me filling a room in the worst letting month of the year. If you served a section 21 before the cut-off and were still sitting on it, last Friday was the last day to issue at court. That one crept up on a lot of people.

Then there was the information sheet, which existing tenants had to have by 31 May. Penalty of up to £7,000 per tenancy for missing it. In a six-bed HMO that is six tenancies, so six copies and six bits of evidence that you sent them, and the council does not find out because it audits you. It finds out because a tenant rings up about a broken extractor fan and someone starts pulling threads.

This Friday it is HMRC's turn. The first Making Tax Digital quarterly update is due on 7 August, and around 864,000 sole traders and landlords are in scope: anyone whose 2024/25 return showed qualifying income over £50,000. Qualifying income means turnover before expenses, which catches a lot more HMO landlords than the headline number suggests. Two rooms let at £600 in a decent city and you are already three quarters of the way there. The threshold drops to £30,000 in April 2027 and £20,000 the year after, so if you are not in it now you almost certainly will be. HMRC has said it will not hand out penalty points for late quarterly updates this tax year, and I think a fair number of landlords have quietly filed that under "ignore". It is not a reprieve. You cannot file the final return until the quarters are in, so it just moves the pain to January when the tax is also due.

I built HMOJO because my spreadsheet stopped coping. Not because it was badly built, but because HMO obligations sit at two levels and a spreadsheet is bad at both at once: licence, fire risk assessment, gas safety and EICR belong to the building, while deposits, right to rent, written terms and the information sheet belong to each individual room and each individual tenant, all on their own clocks. Multiply that by six rooms and a database with a calendar is the honest answer. HMOJO will not certify you as compliant, because no software can do that truthfully and anyone claiming otherwise is selling you a liability rather than a product. What it does is flag what is due, what is missing and what looks wrong, before somebody with enforcement powers spots it first. We open in October. The PRS database arrives around the same time, mandatory registration and an annual fee, so there will be plenty to talk about.