What does landlord property maintenance include?
Landlord property maintenance is the work that keeps a let property fit to let: the garden kept under control, fences standing, doors that shut, and walls and floors a new tenant will not complain about. With DBF it runs from one small job to a whole property turned round, so you are not ringing a gardener, a joiner and a decorator one after another.
Most of what landlords ask us for is one of two kinds of job. They are planned differently, so it helps to know which one you have.
What does a rental garden look like when it has been left?
Usually like the first photograph below. Long grass gone to seed, weeds up through the joints in the paving, litter in the lawn. Nothing is broken, but it is the first thing anyone viewing the property sees, and it gets harder to bring back the longer it is left.
That garden was a tidy-up, front and back: the lawn cut right down, the weeds out of the paving and gravel, the litter picked up. The second photograph is the same lawn afterwards. Grass cut back from that height comes up yellow at first, as this one did, and greens up as it grows.
Fences
On another rental it was the fence. The older boards stayed where they were and new timber posts went in along the run beside the path. A timber fence usually goes at the posts first, at ground level, so it is worth looking at them before a whole run leans over.
What if the whole property has come back in a state?
Then it is a turnaround, and the order of the work matters. We have done exactly this on one house and photographed it as found and as handed back. It was full of rubbish. A door had a hole through it, floors were ripped up and the kitchen units were broken.
It went back with a new bathroom, a new kitchen, a downstairs WC, new white panelled doors, grey carpet throughout and the walls decorated. Clearing came first, because nothing else in a room can be judged until it is empty. Every room is on the our work page, and the turnarounds and refurbishment section covers that size of job.
Which repairs are the landlord's to sort?
In England, section 11 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 makes the landlord responsible for keeping the structure and exterior of a let home in repair, along with its basins, sinks, baths and toilets, on most tenancies of under seven years. Gardens and fences are normally a matter for the tenancy agreement, so check yours for who looks after what while someone is living there.
Either way, the gap between tenancies is when everything is easiest to reach. The rooms are empty, nobody has to be worked round, and ten small things can be dealt with as one job.
If something on the outside is too high for a ladder, we use our own machine: see the cherry picker page. And if you let shops or units as well as homes, there is a separate page on commercial property maintenance.
How do you ask for a price on a rental?
Open the quote form and pick the rental option when it asks what the property is. Three more short questions follow, covering the work, the size of the job and your timing. If you would rather go through the list out loud, ring 07801 477016.
