Stop being the on-call landlord

If you manage your own HMO, you already know the pattern. A tenant messages at 9pm about a dripping tap. Another sends a photo of a loose toilet seat on a Sunday. A third mentions, in passing, that the smoke alarm has been chirping for a week. None of them is an emergency. All of them are now your problem, and you are the only person who knows about them.

Self-managing an HMO is a sensible choice. You keep the agent's fee and you know the house better than anyone. The cost is that HMO maintenance never stops being your job, and with five or six tenants in one property there is always something. This post sets out where that time actually goes, and what a managed maintenance service does with it instead.

Where the time goes

Most of the hours are not spent fixing things. They are spent in the gaps around fixing things:

• Taking the report. Tenants report in whatever channel they like, with whatever detail they feel like giving. You chase for a photo, a room, a time they are in.
• Deciding what it is. Is this a five-minute job, a tradesperson, or something that can wait until you are next there? That call is made at the kitchen table, often from a blurry picture.
• Giving notice. HMO tenants are entitled to proper notice before you or a contractor enters their room. Writing and sending that notice for every small job is tedious, so it gets skipped, and that is a risk.
• Being there. Driving over for a loose handle, finding the tenant is out, driving back.
• Writing it down. Nobody keeps good records of what was done, when, and what it looked like afterwards. Then a deposit dispute or a licensing inspection arrives and the records matter.

The actual repair, in most of these cases, took ten minutes.

What "managed" means in practice

A managed HMO maintenance service does not replace you as the landlord. It replaces you as the first point of contact and as the person who keeps the record. With MyHMOs, each managed property gets:

One reporting route for tenants. Tenants report repairs to the service, not to your mobile. Each report is logged against the property and room, with photos, so it starts as a case rather than a text thread.

Triage before anyone is dispatched. Each case is looked at and sorted: dealt with on the next visit, needs a quote, or needs a trade. You are not asked to make that call from a photo.

A monthly visit that already has a plan. Every managed property gets a scheduled monthly visit with a set checklist. Minor repairs reported during the month are added to that visit, so one trip covers them. Tenants get the access notice ahead of time, sent for you.

Minor repairs done on the visit. Loose door and cupboard handles, toilet seats, roll holders and shower rails, sticking latches, smoke and carbon monoxide alarm batteries, boiler pressure top-ups where safe. On the Standard and Comprehensive tiers that extends to like-for-like replacements, loose shelving and fittings, small patching, resealing and joinery adjustments.

A quote when a job is bigger. Anything outside the included scope comes to you as a quote to approve, not a surprise invoice. Materials, specialist trades, gas and fixed electrical work, structural repairs, emergency callouts and work beyond the agreed visit time are always quoted separately.

A visit report with evidence. After each visit you get a report showing what was checked, what was done, what was found and what is recommended, with photos attached. It sits on the property record permanently.

The record is the point

Landlords tend to buy a maintenance service to save evenings. What they keep it for is the record.

Every tenant report, every notice sent, every visit and every photo is logged against the property in one place. Gas safety, electrical (EICR), EPC and HMO licence dates are tracked alongside it, so you can see what is due before it is overdue.

That matters in three situations every HMO landlord eventually meets: a tenant disputes a deposit deduction, the council asks for evidence that the property is being maintained, or you sell and the buyer's solicitor wants to see how the house has been looked after. In each case you need a dated, photographed history, not a memory of a conversation.

What it costs, and what it does not cover

MyHMOs is priced per property, monthly or annually:

Basic covers tenant reporting, the monthly visit, and small adjustment and tightening jobs within that visit. Standard adds like-for-like replacements and small touch-up jobs. Comprehensive adds patching, resealing and joinery adjustments, with more involved property checks and priority scheduling. The pricing page has the full comparison.

It is worth being clear about the edges. This is not an emergency callout service, and it does not include gas, fixed electrical or structural work. Those are quoted and arranged separately. What it does include is the steady, repeated, low-value work that currently fills your week, and the admin that wraps around it.

Is it worth it for you?

A rough way to judge it: count the repair messages you handled last month, and the trips you made. Put an hourly rate on your own time that you would actually accept. If the number is above the tier price, the service pays for itself before you count the records, the notices and the evenings.

If you own one HMO and live round the corner, it may not. If you own three across Newcastle, Sunderland and Durham and a tenant's message still makes your stomach drop, it probably will.

Next step

MyHMOs currently takes on HMO properties in the North East. See what is included in each tier or ask us to look at your property. You can start on one property and add the others once you have seen a month's reports.