Every Agreement Version and Past Tenancy, Kept

Why this matters

Disputes are almost never about the agreement you are on now. They are about the one that was in force eighteen months ago, when the rent was different and the tenant was someone else.

Under the Limitation Act 1980, a claim on a contract can be brought for up to six years. Deposit scheme dispute windows can run past the end of a tenancy too. So the question a landlord actually needs to answer is not "what is the agreement" but "what was the agreement, on this date".

Previously, a property held one agreement, and re-letting or replacing it pushed the old one out of view.

What you can now do

See every past tenancy on the property. Open a property and use the History tab. Each previous tenancy shows the tenant, the dates, the rent and how it ended — with every agreement attached and viewable as a PDF. On a vacant property, a Past tenancies tab appears, so ending a tenancy no longer collapses the page and hides what came before.

See every version of the current agreement. Earlier versions sit underneath the live one on the Agreement tab, numbered v1, v2, v3, with the date each was recorded. Nothing is one click further away than it needs to be.

Record a renewal or a variation as a new version. When terms change, record the new agreement. The previous one is retained in the history rather than overwritten, so the record shows which document governed which period.

Correct a document without losing the original. If you uploaded the wrong PDF, replace it. The version number stays the same, the original file is kept, and the change is recorded in an audit trail — because silently swapping a signed document is exactly the thing an adjudicator would want explained.

There is always exactly one current agreement per tenancy. That is enforced in the database, not just in the interface, so it cannot drift.

Re-letting a property should never delete a former tenant's evidence. See how the property record works →

Why we kept it rather than tidied it

The tempting design is to keep the current agreement and archive the rest somewhere quiet. We did not, because the moment you need an old version is the moment you are least able to go looking for it — a deposit adjudication, a rent arrears claim, a question from a tribunal about what was actually agreed.

If you are assembling evidence for a deposit dispute, our guide to what actually wins one covers what to include alongside the agreement, and the deposit protection rules set out what the schemes expect you to be able to produce.