Property and facilities management
Managing agents, block managers and FM teams, where the work arrives faster than anyone can log it.
Where it breaks
A small sample of the problems we hear most often in property and facilities management. Not a complete list, and not all of them will be yours.
- 01
Everything arrives as a message
Repairs, complaints, access requests and invoices come in by phone, email and WhatsApp. Getting them into the system is a separate job somebody does later, or doesn't.
- 02
Certificates you have to chase off someone else
The gas record is annual, the EICR runs five years, and each has to reach the tenant inside twenty-eight days of the check. The exposure is yours and the invoice is the landlord's, so the job is chasing a person who has no deadline of their own. The tracker is a spreadsheet, and the first sign it's wrong is an expired certificate on the day a tenancy starts.
- 03
Chasing the contractor, then asking permission
Every landlord's terms of business carry a different spend limit, above which you have to get authorisation before instructing anyone. A manager holding seventy properties is working seventy different thresholds from memory while triaging the tenant's report, deciding whether it's an emergency, instructing, chasing and matching the invoice back to the job.
- 04
Section 20 crossed before anyone noticed
Works where one leaseholder's share passes two hundred and fifty pounds trigger the full consultation: notice of intention, thirty days, statement of estimates with two quotes, another thirty days, then a notice of reasons if you don't take the cheapest. The test is per leaseholder against that block's apportionment, so nobody spots it from the contract value.
- 05
Costs that went past the eighteen-month line
A cost incurred more than eighteen months before you demand it is not recoverable from leaseholders at all, unless they were told in writing inside the window. There is no dispensation route for it, the clock runs from when the cost was incurred rather than when it was paid, and no system in the sector runs that clock.
- 06
Proving the planned maintenance actually happened
The contract specifies the schedules, statutory tasks and best-practice tasks together. The tasks sit in the CAFM, the certificates arrive as PDFs by email from engineers and subcontractors, and the client pack gets assembled by hand out of both every month. Reporting is the thing everybody complains about in every product in this category.
What we'd build
A small sample of the kind of thing we build. What we'd actually scope depends on which of the problems above is costing you most.
Work logged the moment it arrives
Messages on any channel read, classified, raised as a job against the right property and unit, and acknowledged to whoever reported it.
Nothing lost between channels, faster acknowledgement, and an audit trail that is complete by default.
Compliance watched instead of tracked
Expiry dates read out of the certificates themselves rather than re-keyed, the landlord chased months ahead by whichever channel they actually answer on, escalation to the manager when they go quiet, and a separate flag when a tenancy start is approaching without a valid certificate on file.
No expired certificate on the day a tenancy starts, and the chase off the manager's desk.
The statutory money traps watched
Proposed spend measured against each block's own apportionment schedule, so a section 20 threshold gets flagged before anyone commits to a contractor, with the notices drafted and the two thirty-day clocks run. And a live list of any cost approaching eighteen months without having been demanded.
Section 20 and the eighteen-month rule caught before the money becomes unrecoverable.
Contractors chased, and permission asked
Jobs followed up on schedule, updates recorded, anything stalled escalated. Each landlord's spend limit held against their properties, so a job is either released or comes back as a drafted authorisation request with the quote and the photographs already in it.
Faster time to fix, fewer works instructed outside authority, and invoices that match the job.
One view of every building
Arrears, open jobs, compliance and spend against budget per property, taken off the systems you already run. On an FM contract, what was due against what was done, with the certificates matched to the tasks and the statutory ones separated from the rest.
Client reporting produced rather than assembled, and arrears, jobs and spend visible per property.
Recognise any of these?
Thirty minutes with a founder. Walk us through the problems your team lives with and we'll talk about whether any of it has to stay that way.