Continuity – What happens when you lose the person you rely on to keep things running

Often the person responsible for the maintenance of a building has another primary role within a business. This means that they may have relied on someone else to manage the day to day work of running repairs and planning maintenance, cleaning and other essential tasks of keeping a building, whether that is commercial or residential up together.

A couple of examples would be a school where the Bursar or Secretary relies on a caretaker to handle the work, only getting involved when money need to be spent and decisions made. Or a doctor’s surgery who has a local Handyman on call to change lightbulbs, unblock sinks, and do odd bits of painting. What happens if the Caretaker retires or the Handyman gets a better job offer? The days of being able to rely on casual or semi casual labour to deal with critical maintenance issues are passing. The risk to your business, or to your residents as a landlord, of failing to provide a functional environment to live or work in is too high to contemplate an amateur solution.

The answer to this is to retain a multi trade maintenance company when you caretaker retires. There are a number of benefits to going down this route to your maintenance needs.

• No employment costs: The cost of recruiting, paying and equipping a full or part time employee is high, and a drain on the time of the supervising person who has to fill their time rather than carrying out their own job.
• Higher skill sets: Working with a property services company will give you access to a range of tradespeople all qualified, experienced and skilled who will provide quicker longer lasting fixes to problems.
• Planning Ahead: Along with the improved range of skills available, the ability to plan renovation and refurbishment works with a professional eye on where potentially costly and inconvenient breakdowns may occur will save money in the long term.
• Customer Service: This may be as simple as getting a new light bulb in a public area of your residential block fitted quickly, or stopping pipes freezing in an unexpected frost. The visible presence of a uniformed, professional team working on the building will have a positive impact on your standing with tenants, staff and customers.

Express Property Services work with a wide range of clients from single site surgeries, practices, shops and offices, to letting agents and housing associations. We aim to provide a professional service to all our customers, and work with them to ensure their maintenance requirements are covered all day every day. Get in touch to discuss how we can help you.

Categorised in: Maintenance contracts, Property maintenance, Property Management

This post was written by Express Property Services