How much should a letting agent budget for AML compliance checks per let?
For a typical 5-10 person UK letting agency, AML compliance check costs sit between £3 and £25 per check across the main vendors. A Certaby let with a tenant, a landlord and the property risk pack is £3.27, or £4.07 with PEP and adverse media, paid per check with no subscription. It covers sanctions screening (UK, UN, EU and US lists), the ownership walk for company landlords (£2.99 a company), and the property checks (EPC band, MEES verdict, flood band, crime) in a single signed PDF cert per MLR-2017 record-keeping rules. PEP and adverse media are a 40p add-on per person in a Letting transaction.
Per-let cost math: most letting agents run one Letting transaction per new tenancy, with the tenant and the landlord in it. For a 10-tenancies-per-month firm that is £32.70 a month, or £40.70 with PEP and adverse media. For a busier 40-tenancies-per-month firm, that is £198 per month single or £158 per month at 100-pack. Compared with a typical agent's letting fee of 8-12% of first-month rent (£80 to £200 on a £1,000-£2,000 tenancy), the AML check sits at roughly 5-15% of the agent's margin on that fee.
The other vendors price differently. SmartSearch and Credas typically run annual contracts in the £500-£1,200 per month range for a 5-10 person firm depending on seat count and check volume. Veriphy and Thirdfort sit closer to a per-check model in the £4-£15 range but often with seat licences on top. The exact comparison depends on volume, seats, and what is bundled in.
Three practical budgeting principles for AML in a letting firm:
- Budget scales with new business, not headcount. PAYG models like Certaby cost nothing in quiet months and only fire on actual lets. Contract models charge regardless of volume, so a £700 per month minimum hits the same whether the firm did 5 tenancies or 50 that month.
- Plan for the optional extras. The base sanctions plus PEP check is the legal floor under MLR-2017 reg 28. Property facts (flood and MEES) fall under the material-information duty in the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 rather than AML, but they end up in the same file.
- Include the time saving. A manual screen (open the UK Sanctions List, check name, open OpenSanctions PEP, check name, screenshot, store in spreadsheet) takes 30-45 minutes per let. A Certaby letting check takes about 90 seconds. For a firm doing 20 lets a month, that is 10-15 hours of officer time recovered, worth far more than the £81.40 in fees.
The most defensible budget signal: per-check pricing under £10 plus signed audit-cert per check, no annual contract. That is the floor that lets the firm respond to HMRC inspection with concrete evidence without the contract overhead. Certaby's per-check pricing is set to sit well under the manual-time-replacement breakeven for any size of firm.
Source: Certaby pricing
Last updated 2026-05-19.