How We Started

Written on 7 April 2026, before launch. Harthing is now live, and the About page has the current position.

This isn’t a pitch. You’ll find the product on the rest of the site. This is the story of why it exists, because I think it matters, and because if you’re the kind of landlord we built Harthing for, you’ll recognise the moment that started it.

The folder

Every landlord I know has a version of The Folder.

Ours was a lever-arch file that started out properly: tabbed dividers, chronological order, the works. Within eighteen months it had become a loose collection of documents held together by the clip at the top and the vague promise that I’d sort it out before the tax return. Gas safety certificates mixed in with boiler repair invoices. A tenancy agreement I was fairly sure was the current one. Bank statements I’d printed for reasons I could no longer remember.

And then the question came (from a tenant, nothing adversarial) asking whether a repair had been done and when. I knew it had. I’d arranged it, paid for it, and been annoyed about the cost. But could I prove it? Could I produce a dated record showing I’d responded within a reasonable time? I could not. I had a bank transaction from three months ago and a text thread I’d have to scroll through for ten minutes to find.

That was the moment. Not because the question was difficult. Because the answer should have been trivially easy, and it wasn’t.

What we saw

I’m a chartered accountant. I spent fifteen years in financial services (at Hermes, FM Global, Barclays) where every transaction is recorded, reconciled, and auditable as a matter of course. The idea that you’d run a financial operation without an immutable record of what happened and when would get you fired before lunch.

And yet that’s roughly the standard most landlords are working to. Not because they’re careless, because the tools available don’t ask for anything better.

There are property management apps on the market. Some of them are very good. They’ll help you store documents, track rent, set reminders for gas safety renewals. If you have a portfolio of twenty properties and a part-time administrator, several of them will serve you well. But for the landlord with one or two properties, managing alongside a day job, we thought these tools were primarily designed to help you organise information rather than produce evidence.

That’s a meaningful distinction. A document stored in an app proves you had the document. It doesn’t prove when you uploaded it, whether you acted on it, or what happened next. A maintenance log proves you kept a log. It doesn’t prove the timeline is accurate, because anyone could have edited it after the fact. None of it chains together into a coherent, timestamped, tamper-proof account of what you did and when you did it.

My co-founder Neil spent twenty years in investment banking. He coded trading platforms: systems where the audit trail isn’t a feature, it’s the entire point. When I described what I was dealing with on the property side, his reaction wasn’t “that sounds annoying.” It was “that’s an architecture problem.”

He was right. The issue isn’t that landlords don’t have software. It’s that nothing available to them produces records that mean anything when challenged. A WhatsApp message proves you sent a message. A PDF in a folder proves you had a document at some point. A spreadsheet proves you typed numbers into a spreadsheet. None of it is evidence in the way that word is used by a tribunal, an ombudsman, or a court.

What changed

Then the regulations arrived. All of them, at once.

Making Tax Digital went live in April 2026. Landlords with property income over £50,000 now file quarterly digital returns. The threshold drops to £30,000 next year. Section 21 no-fault evictions are abolished on 1 May. Every possession dispute will require documented evidence, which means every landlord needs records they can actually produce on demand. Awaab’s Law is introducing fixed maintenance response timelines with legal consequences for failure.

None of this is unreasonable. Tenants deserve responsive landlords, and HMRC deserves accurate returns. But the landlords being asked to comply are, overwhelmingly, individuals managing one or two properties alongside a day job. They didn’t plan to be landlords. They inherited a flat, or kept a house after moving, or bought a buy-to-let in 2014 when the tax relief still made sense. They’re trying to do the right thing. The regulations assume they have systems. Most of them have a folder and good intentions.

That gap (between what the regulations now demand in terms of provable, producible evidence, and what any available tool actually generates) is why Harthing exists.

What we built

The core of Harthing is what we call the Accountability Record. Every action you take on the platform (logging a repair, uploading a certificate, recording a payment) is timestamped and hash-chained. Nothing can be edited after the fact. Nothing can be backdated. Your record builds itself as you manage, and it’s ready the moment you need it.

This isn’t a design choice we made because it sounds impressive. It’s the architecture Neil built trading systems on. In financial services, an immutable audit trail isn’t optional. It’s the thing that makes the rest of the system trustworthy. We applied the same principle to property management, because property management is going to need the same standard of proof.

The Evidence Bundle (one click, full chronological record for a property) is the thing that would have saved me the afternoon I spent trying to prove I’d arranged a repair. It’s the thing that will matter when a landlord faces a deposit dispute, or an Ombudsman complaint, or a possession hearing under the new rules.

It does use AI. It reads your gas safety certificate and pulls the expiry date so you don’t have to type it. It doesn’t have a name badge, and it doesn’t offer opinions. We use it like a spade: pick it up, do the job, put it down.

Who we are

Three founders. Two chartered accountants and a Cambridge mathematician. Over fifty years in financial services between us. All three of us are, or have been, landlords who self-manage. Adam Saul, our third co-founder, handles the financial architecture, and is, for reasons none of us can fully explain, a director of Rochdale AFC.

We incorporated Harther Ltd in March 2026. We launch on 12 May. The company is self-funded. We don’t have venture capital, we don’t have a board to impress, and the only metric we care about right now is whether the landlords who use Harthing would miss it if it disappeared.

Why this matters

I’ll be honest about what I think is at stake.

The next two years are going to be hard for self-managing landlords. The regulatory burden has increased dramatically, and it’s going to increase further. Some landlords will sell up, and the data suggests many already are. The ones who stay will need to run their properties to a standard that, until now, was only expected of professional managing agents.

We looked at the tools that exist and found plenty that help landlords manage their properties. What we didn’t find was anything that helps them prove they managed properly, with a record that’s immutable, timestamped, and ready to produce the moment someone asks for it.

We built Harthing because we think that proof is going to matter more than it ever has, and because no one else seemed to be building for it.

Good letting, on the record.