Managing maintenance backlogs after a change of agent
When a new managing agent takes over a residential development, there is often a maintenance list waiting for them. Sometimes it is short. Sometimes it is not. The temptation is to promise to get everything sorted quickly, but that is rarely the best way to start. First, you need to work out what is genuinely outstanding, what matters most and what can realistically be done with the money and information available.
Maintenance is one of the quickest ways residents judge whether their managing agent is doing a good job. If a door has not been closing properly for months or water keeps coming in every time it rains, people are not interested in hearing that it is “on a list”. They want to know what is happening with it. When we take over a development, though, we cannot assume that every item on the old maintenance list tells the full story. Some jobs may already have been completed but never closed. Others may have been reported several times under different descriptions. A simple repair on paper can turn into something much bigger once you see it for yourself. That is why the first job is not always to send contractors out. It is to understand what is actually still live.
First, get control of the list
Maintenance issues can be sitting in contractor records, old emails, inspection reports, director correspondence and invoices waiting for approval. We go through the handover information, inspect the site and speak to the people who know the building.
Only then can you start to prioritise properly.
A list of twenty jobs is not a queue where number one gets done first and number twenty waits its turn.
Anything involving safety, security, water ingress or the risk of further damage will usually move up the list.
A failed entrance door or an active leak cannot sensibly be treated in the same way as tired paintwork in a communal hallway. That does not make the smaller jobs unimportant. It simply means people need to understand where they sit and why.
Residents are usually far more patient when they know an issue has been picked up and there is a next step. Silence is what turns a relatively small repair into a much bigger source of frustration.
Look for the problem behind the repair
An inherited maintenance history can also tell you a lot about the building.
If the same roof leak has been patched three times, another patch may not be the answer. If a communal door keeps needing call-outs, replacement may now make more sense than another adjustment. If drains are regularly blocking, clearing them again may solve today’s problem without explaining why it keeps happening.
That is where looking at the backlog as a whole matters. Sometimes the better question is not “who can repair this?” but “why are we still repairing this?”
The financial side cannot be separated from that conversation. A change of managing agent does not suddenly put more money into the service charge account. There may already be other expenditure committed, reserve funds may be limited and some works may need consultation before they can go ahead.
Being straight about that is important. There is little value in promising a job before anyone has worked out how it will be paid for.
Having the right people available helps too. At Cleaver Property Management, our in-house maintenance team gives us flexibility with smaller jobs and initial inspections, while our network of qualified and checked contractors means we can bring in the right trade or specialist when needed.
We do not automatically replace every contractor when we take over a site. If someone knows the development well and is doing a good job, there may be no reason to change them. The aim is to get the right person onto the right job, not to change suppliers simply for the sake of it.
From backlog to a proper plan
Clearing the old maintenance list matters, but it should not be the end of the exercise.
Once the immediate problems are under control, we want to know what the building is likely to need next.
What is reaching the end of its life? When are the external decorations due? Is the lift likely to need major work? Is the roof becoming a recurring issue? Are the reserve funds likely to cover what is coming?
This is where a CAPEX plan becomes genuinely useful.
A good CAPEX plan gives directors a longer-term view of the major items likely to need repair or replacement and roughly when that expenditure may arise. It will never predict everything perfectly, but it gives everyone a much better starting point than waiting for something expensive to fail and then trying to work out how to fund it.
It can also change the way you look at the backlog. Repeated repairs may show that an item is reaching the point where replacement is more sensible than continuing to patch it.
For me, that is the real move from reactive to planned maintenance. You will never remove every surprise- buildings age and things break - but you can reduce the amount of firefighting.
The old maintenance list tells you what you have inherited. What matters is what that list looks like six months later, whether the same faults are still coming back and whether residents still have to chase to find out what is happening.
By Sarah Cleaver, Managing Director, Cleaver Property Management
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