Photo by Colony Living
Dealing with maintenance and repairs in a HMO can take up a lot of your time, money and effort and can become an ongoing headache. When letting any property, it must remain in good working order, and landlords must keep up with any maintenance issues that come up.
There are ways you can boost your property maintenance strategy that will allow you to keep costs down and overall improve your service offering. Here I’m going to talk about how to stay on top of maintenance and repairs in your HMO while dealing with cost rises. I’ll also include some tips to help you do this efficiently and effectively!
Increasing Maintenance Costs
With growing financial pressures, landlords are all feeling the impact of higher bills and costs, and property maintenance is another area we’ve seen this in. Since 2022, the average UK landlord now spends around 26%, or £285, more on property maintenance costs per year, according to Towergate Direct.
The most expensive repairs include roof damage, electrical issues and heating problems. And naturally costs vary across the UK with landlords in certain regions paying more on average for certain repairs.
Even with costs going up, it’s still imperative you get this part of owning a HMO right. If you don’t handle maintenance and repairs well, you could face disputes with tenants, which could leave you in a real heap of bother!
According to Towergate Direct’s survey, almost 60% of landlords have had disagreements with tenants over maintenance, which is up from 48.5% in 2022. As rental prices have increased, this may have also led to heightened expectations from tenants about the service they’re provided, so this may be an area you need to look at improving to keep up with the competition!
The Importance of Getting This Right
As HMO landlords, it’s essential that you deal with maintenance and repairs swiftly and efficiently, ensuring your property is safe and liveable, keeping your tenants happy and preventing anything from worsening that could ultimately cost you a lot more in your property!
While this takes time and money to do effectively, it’s a very important part of owning a HMO. At the same time, modern tenants expect a better service, so we all need to get this right to make sure we don’t get left behind.
Emergency and urgent items have to be done quickly as that’ll have an effect on your tenants and potentially your property as well. However, some things just don’t… So, it can be helpful to have expectations set from the outset. This can take some of the pressure off and buy yourself time to get the right people in and to be able to shop around for the right materials.
3 Tips on How to Boost Your Maintenance Strategy
While we all know handling the maintenance that comes with HMOs can be difficult, you can improve the success and sustainability of your property if you do this the right way. Here are some top tips to help you improve your HMO maintenance strategy while managing the costs where possible!
- Focus on being proactive. Being proactive will help you save time and money in the long run. Don’t be reactive with this and wait for things to happen before you deal with them! Having the right attitude towards tackling maintenance is key here.
Inspecting your property regularly can help you identify any issues before they become bigger problems. While this takes time, it can be extremely beneficial and may even save you money and headaches later down the line!
- Be realistic with maintenance costs and timelines. With the costs of labour and materials having gone up and as it can be challenging to get the right tradespeople in, make sure you’re being realistic when estimating maintenance costs and timelines from the outset.
This will allow you to better prepare and budget for these financial costs ahead of time and make sure your tenants are aware of the expected timelines.
- Work with professionals. It’s crucial to work with experienced and trusted tradespeople. Sometimes it’s difficult to build trusted relationships in every trade but have those relationships in place wherever possible.
Overall property management can be challenging and is often considered one of the most overwhelming areas of HMO investment! Self-managing simply isn’t for everyone, especially if one of the reasons you invested in property was to have more time and freedom of choice.
As HMO landlords, we need to constantly stay on top of managing maintenance and providing a great service to tenants. And if you’re looking for support, guidance and advice, sign up for The HMO Roadmap or join our free Facebook group The HMO Community.
About the Author:
Andy Graham is the founder and the lead trainer at The HMO Roadmap! He is also the co-founder of The HMO Mastermind, writes as a regular columnist in different magazines about a variety of HMO topics and is the host of The HMO Podcast! Follow Andy on Instagram!