Your rent may be repriced every Tuesday

Under a proposal being modelled by a large build-to-rent operator, tenancies would move from a fixed annual rent to a rate recalculated every seven days. The tenancy agreement itself would not change. Only the number inside it would — on a Tuesday morning, before most of the people paying it are awake.

None of the components would be new. Occupancy across the block, asking prices at three competing developments, search volume for the postcode, the school calendar, the weather forecast and the number of viewings booked for the weekend would feed a model of the kind that already prices hotel rooms, car hire and short-haul seats. The only genuinely novel step would be pointing it at the room in which a family sleeps.

“Nobody's rent would be increased,” a spokesperson for the operator would be expected to say. “There would be no such thing as an increase, because there would be no previous figure to increase from. We think residents will find that reassuring, once they stop looking for one.”

The difficulty would present itself at the kitchen table rather than in the app. A household budget is a column of numbers, and the largest number in it has historically been the most boring: fixed, known twelve months ahead, the beam everything else is hung from. Under weekly repricing that line would hold a range instead, and the standing order would have to go, since a standing order pays a fixed sum. In its place the model proposes a flexible mandate that collects whatever is owed. The tenant would pay exactly the right amount and would never know it in advance.

The loyalty mechanism is the part most likely to survive consultation. A resident who raised no query about their weekly rate within forty-eight hours would accrue a stability credit, redeemable against the following quarter. The credit would be small. It would also be the first rent discount in history awarded for incuriosity.

Prices would move downward as well, and the operator would stress this at length. Internal modelling would suggest the reductions arrive in February, in the flats nobody wants to move into in February, and are largest in precisely the weeks when a household is least able to act on them, since acting on them would mean moving house.

Nothing has been announced, filed or signed, and the operator would describe the work as exploratory. But software that recommends rents to large landlords already exists, the portfolios big enough to run it keep growing, and the distance between a recommendation refreshed once a year and one refreshed every Tuesday is not an invention. It is a setting.