Contractor Management

Contractor vetting and approval

Apart from needing contractors to work to certain rules and standards, we carry a significant  legal liability when instructing and managing contractors on behalf of Owners, e.g. if the contractor causes a fault in the property, or someone is injured. We therefore ensure we carefully select, test and approve our contractors, including:

• They have the appropriate registrations and accreditations for their work
• They have met all relevant health and safety requirements for their work
• Their insurance cover is appropriate and in date
• They meet our warranty arrangements, ensuring we can usually call them back to any faulty work for an extended period
• They will meet our data protection requirements, ensuring Owner and Resident personal details are properly managed and secured
• They will meet our standards of conduct when in Resident’s homes
• They will keep accurate records of communications with Residents (essential requirement to prove Owners have acted properly)
• They will manage arranging access with the residents
• They will follow our key management procedure
• They will follow our invoicing requirements
• They will give work appropriate priority – usually faster than possible for direct paying customers.

Unless these steps have been successfully completed, we can’t be involved in instructing or managing any contractor, even if the Owner is content with them.

Owners preferred contractors

To protect against the above risks and liabilities we offer Owners a choice

1. The Owner instructs and manages their own contractor
2. The Owner pays £75 for us to put the contractor through our contractor approval process (we would not charge if this is a contractor we need or already use!).
3. Use one of the existing approved contractors.

Using service contracts e.g. boiler cover

There are a number of service contracts covering things such as boilers, plumbing,  showers, appliances etc.

Despite the marketing, these are rarely good value for Owners. In fact the consumer organisation Which? do a review of Boiler Servicing each year and have consistently found there are only three situations where having cover may make sense:

1. Where this is the only way to get the item covered (e.g. a fixed price repair of an unknown issue in exchange for a service contract)
2. The item is old and may need repairs where parts are limited
3. You can’t get engineers where you live (which does not apply to our area!)

Usually such cover comes from the manufacturer.

Apart from service contracts usually not being good value for owners, their repairs can be slower than using a local contractor, which is a potential issue for landlords, who have shorter timeframes than an owner occupier may accept.

And it is important to consider these contracts usually take much more time to manage than local contractors – reporting any issue can mean being on hold for ages (an hour or more is not uncommon), plus they do not always arrange access with the resident, which causes additional lost time. Given this we sadly need to charge an hourly rate when managing these contractors, which adds to the question of whether these are cost effective or not.