The compliance calendar a dedicated administrator runs

Underneath every managed portfolio is a calendar of statutory dates, and the portfolio’s real condition is the state of that calendar. The items are individually familiar to anyone in lettings; what is less often stated is their collective shape — recurring, dated, evidenced — and what that shape implies about who should run them.

What the calendar contains

• Gas safety: a check every twelve months, per property with gas, with the record served on the tenant.
• Electrical safety: an inspection cycle running to five years, with the report actioned where it demands work, and served.
• Energy performance: a valid certificate at marketing and the minimum-standard rules behind it.
• Smoke and carbon monoxide alarms: fitted, and evidenced as working at the start of the tenancy.
• Deposits: protected within the statutory window, with the prescribed information served and provably served.
• Licensing: whichever selective, additional or HMO schemes your councils run, each with its own renewal date and conditions.
• And since the Renters’ Rights Act commenced: the written statement of terms before signing, and the Information Sheet obligations we covered in an earlier note — dated paperwork with penalties behind it.

Why it fails in the gaps of other jobs

None of these items is difficult. Every one of them is dated, and the dates do not negotiate. The standard failure is not ignorance but custody: the calendar lives in fragments — some in the software, some in a spreadsheet, some in the head of whoever renewed the licence last time — and it is tended in the gaps of jobs that are measured on something else. A negotiator is paid to let property; every certificate they chase is chased instead of that, and the chasing loses. The misses are quiet, and they surface at the worst possible moment, which in the current regime means a civil penalty or an unusable notice.

Run properly, the calendar is one person’s owned routine: a single view of every date on the book, worked forward — booking engineers weeks ahead of expiry, not days — with every serving recorded against the tenancy at the moment it happens. The test of the arrangement is boring and absolute: on any given morning, can someone produce the list of everything expiring in the next sixty days, and the evidence for everything served in the last sixty? If yes, the portfolio is compliant in the only sense that survives a tribunal. If no, the gaps are already there and merely undiscovered.

This is the most natural single block of work to hand to a dedicated administrator, because it is pure shape: recurring, procedural, dated, evidenced. It is also the block where the case does not rest on cost at all. It rests on the difference between a diary someone owns and a diary everyone shares.

The item list above is a working summary, not legal advice, and the regimes move — the Act’s commencement this year being the proof. Confirm current requirements against your own counsel’s advice.

Ejas Deane is a partner of the firm. He answers enquiries himself.