When Your Landlord Says They're Selling: Your Rights Now

The one thing people get wrong

A Ground 1A notice is not an eviction. It is a letter that starts a clock.

Serving a Section 8 notice does not end your tenancy: it opens the gateway for a court to grant possession, and until either a possession order is made or you leave voluntarily, rent is still due and repairs are still owed

. Plenty of London letting agents send the notice and then start talking about "checkout dates" as though the two were the same thing. They are not.

The second thing worth knowing before you read the notice properly: a landlord who uses the sale ground and then quietly puts the flat back on the rental market is committing an offence.

Where a landlord uses ground 1 or 1A and then re-lets or markets the property within the restricted period, they can be prosecuted and fined up to £40,000

. That is your leverage, and most tenants never use it.

What Ground 1A is and how the timings work

Section 21 was abolished on 1 May 2026 and all existing and new tenancies converted to assured periodic tenancies, which means every eviction must now follow the Section 8 process with a clear, evidence-based ground

.

Ground 1A is one of the new mandatory grounds: it lets a landlord recover the property where they intend to sell it, and because it is mandatory, the court must grant possession if the conditions are met.

So the argument is never about whether it is fair. It is about whether the notice is valid and whether the intention to sell is genuine.

Three numbers govern the timetable:

A new tenancy is protected from a Ground 1A claim for at least its first year, and this is a hard rule

| | Notice length | Four months from service |

The notice period for Ground 1A is four months from the date of service, under the new section 8(4AA) of the Housing Act 1988

| | Re-let ban | Roughly 16 months from the date the notice was served |

The restricted period generally starts when the notice is served and ends 12 months after the date specified in the notice as the earliest date proceedings can begin, so the landlord is barred from re-letting for a minimum of about 16 months

|

The protected period trips agents up more than anything else.

The notice can be served after month eight, provided it expires no earlier than the end of month 12

. If your tenancy began in April 2026 and the notice arrived in August 2026, expiring in December 2026, that is inside the protected year and the notice is worthless.

Note also that older tenancies converted on 1 May 2026 rather than restarting, so if you have been in the flat since 2023, the protected period is long behind you and this particular defence is not available to you.

Checking the notice properly

Do this with the tenancy agreement open beside you. Work through in order.

1. Is it the right form?

The prescribed form for Section 8 is Form 3, not Form 6A, which was the old Section 21 form.

Notices produced on agency letterhead with no reference to Form 3 are a bad sign. 2. Does it state the ground in full?

The notice must include the full property address, the names of all tenants, every ground relied on with its full statutory wording rather than just a number, a short explanation of why each ground applies, and the date after which proceedings may begin: errors here are the most common reason a notice is declared invalid.

1. Was every joint tenant served?

Each joint tenant must be served individually; serving one is not enough.

1. Do the dates add up? Four clear months, and expiry outside the protected 12 months.
2. Is the ground the right one? If the notice cites Ground 1 (landlord or family moving in) but the agent is telling you the flat is being sold, that is not a slip.

The Court of Appeal in Pease v Carter applied a "reasonable recipient" test to defective notices, but a notice citing the wrong ground or using the wrong form is a fundamental defect rather than a technical one.

One more date to diary:

a Section 8 notice lapses if the landlord does not begin possession proceedings within 12 months of serving it, and a notice cannot be amended once served, so an error means withdrawing it and starting again

.

The email to send your letting agent

Keep it short, factual and in writing. Ask for four things:

• the ground being relied on, quoted in full as it appears on the notice;
• the tenancy start date the landlord is using to calculate the protected period;
• the earliest date on which possession proceedings may begin, as stated in the notice;
• confirmation of whether the flat is being marketed for sale with vacant possession.

That last question matters because plenty of London flats sell perfectly well tenanted, particularly ex-council stock and low-yield conversions that only appeal to investors anyway. If the agent's answer is vague, you have a paper trail suggesting the sale intention is soft.

Do not sign anything described as a surrender, a deed of surrender or a "mutual agreement to end the tenancy", and do not hand keys back early in exchange for a goodwill payment without advice.

The restricted period that stops the flat being re-let runs from the service of the Ground 1A notice.

Walk away by agreement instead and you may hand back the protection that makes misuse expensive for the landlord.

What an invalid notice actually buys you

Not a permanent right to stay. A valid notice can be served again the following week. What it buys is time and negotiating room, and in a market where London rents sit at record levels, months are money.

The realistic outcomes are: the landlord reissues correctly and you have gained four months of runway from the new date; the landlord offers to pay your moving costs to avoid the delay; or the landlord decides to sell tenanted, in which case nothing changes for you.

After the landlord sells, the tenancy continues on the same terms, and a landlord who wants to change the terms, for example to increase the rent, must follow the correct process.

Your own exit route is worth understanding, because it is now unusually flexible.

Since 1 May 2026, tenants can serve two months' notice to quit in writing whenever they like, from the very first day of the tenancy, and are no longer tied into a fixed term.

The notice can be shorter if the landlord has agreed to a shorter period in writing, including in the tenancy agreement

, and

many older tenancy agreements required only one calendar month's notice from the tenant, with government guidance saying the shorter period in the agreement prevails in certain cases, including where the tenancy was periodic from the start

. Check your agreement. If you find a flat in week three, that clause could save you a month's rent.

If the flat is re-let rather than sold

This is where the new rules have teeth, and enforcement depends almost entirely on former tenants noticing.

A landlord or their representative commits an offence if they re-let or market the property during the 12-month restricted period, with a maximum fine of £40,000

. Separately,

where the landlord or their representative did not reasonably believe possession could be obtained on the ground, the local authority can issue a penalty of up to £7,000, which is not a criminal matter

.

A local authority can impose a financial penalty where satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that a landlord offence has been committed, up to a maximum of £40,000.

A Rent Repayment Order is also possible.

Enforcement is in practice tenant-led and local-authority-led: breaches tend to surface when a former tenant reports the property being re-let, and council housing enforcement teams can then investigate and issue civil penalties.

Practical steps, none of which take long:

• Save the notice as a PDF, along with the envelope, email headers or certificate of service.
• Set a property alert on the major portals for your exact postcode and flat number, and check monthly for a year.
• Screenshot any new listing with the date and price visible, and keep the URL.
• Buy the title register from HM Land Registry for a small fee to see whether ownership actually changed hands, and when.
• Report suspected breaches to the private sector housing team at the borough council, not to the agent.

If your rent went out by standing order or through a rent-reporting app, that record is also useful evidence of the tenancy dates. Our piece on how rent payment apps and open banking are rewriting London renting covers what those platforms keep and how to export it.

Where in London the sale notices are clustering

Nobody publishes a borough-level count of Ground 1A notices, so treat any number you see quoted as an estimate. What is published is the sales data, and it explains why some landlords are heading for the exit now.

According to the ONS release on private rent and house prices for July 2026,

London prices fell 3.7% in the 12 months to May 2026, the ninth consecutive month of annual falls

, and

the decline came primarily from Inner London at negative 5.9%, with Outer London down only 0.3% and large falls in local authorities such as Westminster and Tower Hamlets

. Borough figures from the UK House Price Index for December 2025 show the same split more starkly:

Westminster down 14.8%, Kensington and Chelsea down 11.5%, Camden down 11.1%, Tower Hamlets down 10.9% and Hammersmith and Fulham down 9.5%

, against

rises in Bromley, Havering, Waltham Forest, Lewisham and Redbridge

.

Meanwhile

the ONS puts the average monthly private rent in London at £2,302 in June 2026, up from £2,252 a year earlier

, with

Kensington and Chelsea the most expensive local authority in the country at £3,596

. Rent inflation in London is now the slowest of any English region:

2.2% in the 12 months to June 2026

, and one analysis of the same ONS series has

Islington highest at 5.4% and Westminster actually negative at 2.5%

.

Read those two datasets together and the pattern is clear. The notices are concentrated in the inner boroughs where capital values are falling and yields are thin, which happens to be where re-letting quickly is hardest. That is bad news for a landlord bluffing about a sale.

It also means the flat you move to may cost less than you fear. Central rents are flat or falling while outer London is where prices are rising. If you are rebuilding a shortlist under time pressure, our guide to the best areas for young professionals is a reasonable starting filter, and if the new place has a poor EPC, the energy retrofit rules give you a specific lever on rent.

Things to do in the next seven days

Book a free appointment with Shelter, Citizens Advice or your borough's housing options team, and take the notice with you. Do it while the notice still has months to run, not in the final fortnight.

Tell the council early. A valid notice means you are threatened with homelessness, and the duty to help you starts before the notice expires, not after a bailiff appointment. That matters in a city where, on the Mayor's own Housing Committee evidence,

more than 90,000 children are living in temporary accommodation

.

Keep paying rent. A mandatory sale ground is hard to defeat; adding arrears hands the landlord a second ground and destroys your references.

On viewings:

you can ask the landlord to rearrange if the proposed time is not convenient

, though

a tenant who refuses viewings outright should weigh the effect on their reference

. Offer two fixed windows a week, in writing, and insist the agent accompanies every visit. Reasonable cooperation costs you little and makes it much harder for a landlord to claim you obstructed the sale.