Landlord and BTL Blog: Landlords building & property maintenance

Friday, November 04, 2016

Landlords building & property maintenance

A landlords building and maintenance responsiblities are never ending. My latest challenge is to try and sort some decaying soffit boards. The result of these rotting boards is that somehow I have ended up with rats in the roof space. Not great for the tenants and something that they needed to bring in a local pest control business.

How do landlords find reliable tradespeople?

The challenge that I now face is securing the right contractors to do the work. I do have a regular maintenance guy, Mick, who is great at doing the odd job for me but at going on 70+ his days of hanging off a ladder, replacing rotted soffit boards and guttering, are over.

So how does a landlord find reliable tradespeople?

I thought that I would give a new website a go. My Builder is a website that has been around for several years. You post up the details of a maintenance job and then contractors respond and put themselves forward to be considered for the job.

My initial impressions are pretty good. Having posted a job on Monday evening by the next day I had 5 contractors interested. The next stage is to shortlist the tradespeople for the maintenance work.

This is all pretty straightforward and done through the website platform. I've selected a couple of contractors mainly on the basis of their positive reviews and proximity to my rental property.

Landlords keeping it local for sourcing property maintenance tradespeople

I'm a great believer on keeping it local. Let's remember for a contractor time is money. If they are an hour commute across town then this will cost you. If they live round the corner this will all be reflected in their quote for the job.

Also, where the maintenance work requires the tradesperson to come back to site on a number of occasions this is much easier for them to do. If there is a problem and they are just round the corner things can be sorted quickly.

So far so good...I'll let you know how I get on.