BuildingHQAsk a landlord how they handle repairs and the honest answer is usually some combination of text messages, a phone call, and remembering. That works at two units. At ten it produces the conversation every landlord eventually has: “I told you about this months ago.” And the uncomfortable part is that you genuinely cannot be sure they did not.
The fix is not a bigger system. It is a single place where a report becomes a record, and a habit of triaging that record the day it arrives.
One channel, or the record has holes
If tenants can report a problem by text, by email, by phone, by mentioning it to a contractor and by telling you in the street, then there is no complete list of outstanding repairs anywhere — and there cannot be, because four of those five channels leave nothing behind.
Pick one channel and make it the easy one. Whatever else happens, anything reported by any route gets entered there the same day, by you if necessary. A repair that exists only in your head is not tracked; it is remembered, and remembering has a half-life of about four days.
What every entry needs, at minimum: which unit, who reported it, when, what they said in their own words, and a photograph where the problem is visible. Ask for the photograph at report time — it costs the tenant nothing and it settles a surprising number of later questions about severity and cause.
Triage in three bands
Not everything is urgent, and treating everything as urgent is indistinguishable from treating nothing as urgent. Three bands are enough:
| Band | What it covers | Typical target |
|---|---|---|
| Emergency | Risk to safety or to the building: gas smell, no heat or hot water in cold weather, major leak or flood, electrical danger, no water, anything making the property insecure or uninhabitable. | Same day |
| Urgent | Materially affects living in the property but is not dangerous: a failed appliance, a partial leak, a broken lock on an internal door, heating faults in mild weather. | 3–5 days |
| Routine | Everything else: cosmetic damage, minor wear, things that want doing at the next visit. | Up to 28 days |
These targets are a common industry shape, not a legal standard — yours may be shorter.
Many jurisdictions impose statutory repair obligations and response times on landlords, and some now set specific deadlines for hazards such as damp and mould with penalties for missing them. Check the requirements where your property is and set your bands to whichever is shorter: the law's or your own.
Acknowledge immediately, even with no answer
The single highest-value habit in maintenance is replying within a few hours to say you have received the report and what happens next — before you have arranged anything.
Most maintenance complaints are not really about repair time. They are about silence. A tenant who has heard nothing for four days assumes they have been ignored and escalates, often to somebody with more authority than you would like. A tenant who was told on day one that a plumber is booked for Thursday will wait until Thursday without a word.
Set the expectation you can meet, not the one that sounds best. “Someone will look at it this week” and then Thursday is a success. “I'll get someone out tomorrow” and then Thursday is a failure — same repair, same day, opposite relationship.
The chain each job has to leave behind
Every job should be able to answer these five questions afterwards, from the record and not from memory:
- Reported — when, by whom, described how.
- Acknowledged — when you replied, and what you promised.
- Assigned — which contractor, when they were instructed, when they were due.
- Completed — what was actually done, when, and what it cost.
- Confirmed — the tenant agreeing it is resolved.
The last step is the one everyone drops, and it is the one that closes the loop. Without it your list slowly fills with jobs that are finished but do not look finished, and after a few months you stop trusting the list — at which point you have a system you ignore, which is worse than no system, because it produces false confidence.
Access and entry
Record the arrangement, not just the repair. When access was requested, when it was agreed, whether the tenant was present, and whether anyone could not get in. Missed appointments are a real cost — you often pay for the visit — and a pattern of them is worth having in writing before you raise it.
Notice requirements for entry vary by jurisdiction and are usually strict. Whatever the local rule, asking rather than announcing costs nothing and avoids most disputes about entry entirely.
Cost the job to the unit
File the invoice against the unit and the job, not just against the month it was paid. Two things follow, and both are valuable:
You can see the money pit. At year end, the maintenance spend per unit is a real list rather than one aggregate number. The unit costing four times the others is visible, and it is usually visible long before it becomes obvious in any other way.
Recurring faults become a capital decision. Three boiler repairs in eighteen months is not a maintenance history; it is an argument for replacement, with the arithmetic already done. Landlords who only track total spend keep making the repair decision over and over because each individual call-out looks cheaper than a replacement — which it is, right up until you add them together.
The repair-versus-improvement distinction also has tax consequences, which are covered in rental bookkeeping that survives tax time.
Contractors
Keep for each one: what they do, their rates, insurance and qualification details with expiry dates, and which jobs they have done for you. Two or three per trade, not one — the single trusted plumber is excellent until the week they are on holiday and you have a leak.
Note who you would not use again, and why. You will not remember in a year, and the note takes ten seconds.
Tenants report problems from their own portal, with photographs, and the report lands against the unit with a timestamp nobody has to take on trust. Requests carry a priority and a status through to completion, contractors can be given access to just the jobs assigned to them, and the invoice attaches to the job — so the maintenance history and the cost per unit are the same record rather than two lists you reconcile.
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