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Landlord Lab
About Us

Your compliance department. Because compliance doesn't manage itself.

Operating safely in a regulated sector takes more than knowing the rules. It takes investment, time and discipline, applied consistently, without gaps, month after month. That is what effective compliance management actually requires. And the honest truth is that it is relentless. Sometimes tedious. Precisely the kind of work that gets deprioritised when life gets busy, and precisely where the gaps appear.

What This Actually Means

A managed compliance function, not a tool.

We are not a reminder service. We are not software. We are the infrastructure, knowledge, skills and guidance to manage your compliance risk professionally, the same function that large regulated organisations employ entire departments to deliver.

The obligations remain yours as the landlord. What we provide is everything around them: the expertise to know what they are, the systems to meet them, the documentation to prove it, and the professional accountability of a qualified team.

Building that function in-house, the salaries, training, regulatory subscriptions, legal counsel, costs a regulated business tens of thousands of pounds a year to staff. For a landlord with one property or twenty, that has never been a realistic option. Until now.

What It Gives You Back

Your time. Your headspace. Your portfolio.

A compliance department tracks what you owe, when you owe it, and what happens if you don't. It handles the detail so you don't have to carry it in your head. It removes compliance from your mental load, not by making it disappear, but by making it someone else's disciplined, ongoing responsibility.

That frees you to be a landlord. Not a compliance administrator.

The gaps in landlord compliance rarely come from ignorance of the rules. They come from the grind of managing them, the renewal that slips, the document that wasn't updated, the change that arrived while everything else was happening. Structure is the only reliable answer.
Why We're The Right People To Do This

We are the compliance specialists the property sector now needs.

For over a century, the infrastructure around private renting has been built around one thing: transactions. Agents, platforms, advisors, the entire sector was designed to facilitate buying, selling and letting. Compliance was always secondary to the deal. That is a different skill set and a different mindset entirely.

The team behind Landlord Lab came from industries where compliance failure means enforcement action, regulatory sanction, and consequences that don't go away. Financial services. Audit. Risk transformation across global markets. We have built compliance departments before, in large organisations, under real regulatory pressure, and we have done it successfully. We know what it takes because we have done it.

We are also landlords. Every member of the founding team has operated in the private rented sector as investors. We understand the compliance obligation because we live with it ourselves.

A Word From Our Founder

Built from experience. Not theory.

Mike Bains

Founder & CEO

"I started with one property in the early 2000s. Over 25 years I built a portfolio of over 20 properties with an asset value above £10m, through developments, conversions, commercial investments and every regulatory change the sector has thrown at landlords in that time. I know what it takes to scale safely because I have had to figure it out myself.

What I also know is that the market was not providing what landlords actually needed. The tools were built for agents. The advice was built around transactions. Nobody was building the compliance infrastructure that serious landlords required. That is why Landlord Lab exists."

25 years
as an active landlord
20+ properties
across residential & commercial
£10m+
portfolio asset value
The Team

Compliance professionals who are also landlords.

The combination is deliberate. Understanding the regulatory landscape is not the same as understanding what it feels like to live with it as an investor. We do both.

Mike Bains

Founder & CEO

PwC · Chartered Accountant

Two decades as a PwC-trained Chartered Accountant, advising businesses from owner-managed firms to multi-billion pound listed companies across London, New York and Cape Town. Landlord since the early 2000s, building a portfolio through residential developments, conversions and commercial investments. The combination of financial rigour and ground-level property experience, as both landlord and long-term tenant, is the foundation Landlord Lab is built on.

Randeep Sandhu

COO & Business Development Director

28 years · risk & regulation

28 years leading large-scale risk and regulatory transformation across global markets including Madrid, New York and Tokyo. Shaped by senior roles within the UK's largest banks, including navigating the intensive compliance overhaul that followed the 2008 financial crisis. As a landlord himself, Randeep brings both the institutional rigour of financial-grade compliance and first-hand understanding of what that means in practice for property investors.

Jaspal Merbay

Head of Compliance

20+ years · consumer regulation

Over two decades in regulated financial services and property compliance, with a specialism in consumer-facing regulation, the area held to the highest standards of documentation, disclosure and duty of care. A landlord himself, Jaspal brings that dual perspective directly to her work: understanding both the regulatory requirement and the practical reality of meeting it. He is known for translating complex obligations into clear, evidenced processes that hold up to scrutiny.

Advisory Board

The specialists behind the service.

Our advisors bring depth in the areas where landlords need specialist understanding, overseas ownership and the product experience that determines whether a service actually gets used.

Arita Bains

Overseas Landlords

Fifteen years of property experience across South Africa and England, operating simultaneously as landlord, property manager and overseas owner. Founder and operator of two businesses. Arita joined the board to ensure the overseas landlord experience, managing UK property from abroad across time zones and jurisdictions, is built into Landlord Lab from the ground up, not retrofitted.

Chris James

Digital Strategy & Product

Over two decades building and shipping digital products across early-stage startups and established consumer platforms. Former COO of Scribehound, founder of DayOne. Chris keeps Landlord Lab's product honest, ensuring that what gets built is what actually gets used, and that the gap between compliance expertise and a landlord's day-to-day experience stays closed.

Accreditations & Protections

How our standards protect you.

Professional services firms are only as trustworthy as the standards they are held to. These are ours, and what each one means for you.

Regulation

ARLA Propertymark

Full membership of the UK's leading professional body for lettings, with the conduct standards, ongoing training requirements and oversight that membership demands.

Your money

Client Money Protection

Government-backed scheme membership. Any client funds we hold are protected independently, a legal requirement we meet as standard.

Your funds

Protected client account · Griffin

Client money is held in a dedicated, ring-fenced account with Griffin, a regulated UK bank. Your funds are never co-mingled with our operating finances.

Our advice

Professional Indemnity Insurance

PII cover via Propertymark's Company Advantage scheme. If our professional guidance falls short, you have formal recourse. That accountability matters.

Disputes

Property Redress Scheme

Membership of a government-approved redress scheme gives you a formal, independent route to challenge us if something goes wrong. Accountability, not just assurances.

Professional standing

ICAEW & NRLA

Our founder remains an active member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants and the National Residential Landlords Association, keeping us current in both disciplines.

Serious compliance. Simply done.

Your portfolio is exposed.
Let's change that.

Compliance Shield gives you expert-managed, fully documented compliance, so you can keep running your portfolio without the legal exposure keeping you up at night.

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Compliance intelligence, written by Mike. No noise, no filler.