About Umbra Lettings

We didn’t set out to build “just another letting agency.” Honestly, if you’d told us back in 2019 where things would end up, we probably wouldn’t have believed you.

Umbra Lettings started life as GS Homes Lettings, a small operation working across Portsmouth, Gosport and Fareham. The idea was simple enough, though: landlords in this area were fed up with agents who charged a lot and did very little to earn it. Hidden fees, slow communication, compliance treated as an afterthought rather than something you actually plan for. We thought there was a better way to do it, so we tried.

A few years in, we rebranded to Umbra Lettings. The name change reflected something real, we’d grown past being a one-postcode outfit and moved into Southampton too, and the way we worked had matured along with it. We’re now ARLA Propertymark Protected, which isn’t just a badge on a website, it means client money protection and a proper regulatory framework sits behind everything we do. Over 800 tenancies later, we’re still run the same way we started: lean, direct, and genuinely invested in getting it right for landlords rather than just processing paperwork.

What we actually do differently

There’s a lot of noise in this industry about “differentiators,” so we’ll try to keep this grounded.

Pricing you can actually understand. Full property management sits at 9% a month, no sliding scale of extras bolted on later. If you just need a tenant found, that’s a flat £599. And if you’re a hands-on landlord who mainly wants the compliance side handled properly, we do that too, as a standalone service. You choose the level, we don’t push you into a package that suits us more than it suits you.

Compliance is the actual job, not a side note. With the Renters’ Rights Act reshaping so much of how tenancies work, this matters more than it ever has. We keep on top of the legal side so landlords aren’t caught out, whether that’s the right paperwork at the right time or knowing when something’s changed that affects a live tenancy.

We’re small enough to know what’s going on. We’re not going to pretend we’re the biggest agency in the area, we’re not, and that’s rather the point. When you call, you’re speaking to someone who actually knows your property, not being passed round a call centre.

If you’re a landlord in Portsmouth, Gosport, Fareham or Southampton who’s had enough of agents that overpromise and underdeliver, we’d genuinely like to hear from you. Book a market appraisal, or just give us a ring, whichever feels easier.