Self Manage or Use an Agency?

Letting Agents

My husband and myself own two BTL in our private names, we also own other property through a Ltd company. The two BTL are 4 bed detached houses in our local area, both single lets not HMO.

We have been succesfully self managing the two BTL and just using letting agent to do tenant find/referencing. So far so good and we have been lucky with no tenant issues in the 6 years we've been doing it. The houses are new builds so there have only been a few minor maintenance/repair issues and we've had good tenants.

One tenant is moving out soon and my husband is keen that we do our own tenant find as well as self management. Our local agents charge one months rent plus VAT and he feels that is a lot of money.

In practice it would be me doing the admin as he works full time and I am the one who already deals with it. I am in the process of looking at all the NRLA template documentation etc to see what is involved. I am used to running a small business and feel I could cope with the admin but I quite like having the back up of an agent just "in case" there is a problem at the end of a tenancy etc.

Would be interested to hear from those who fully self manage - pitfalls? etc. thanks.