Almost every large repair bill in a Central London rental started as something small and visible that nobody looked at. A grout line. A slow drip in a cupboard. A fan that had stopped moving air. A consumer unit that was already tired at the last inspection. None of these were emergencies when they began. All of them became emergencies eventually, at a worse time, in an occupied flat, with a tenant who now has a complaint and a leaseholder downstairs who has a claim.
A maintenance checklist is simply the mechanism that catches those things while they are still cheap. What follows is organised by when rather than by trade, because that is how the work actually lands on a landlord.
The dated obligations: run them as a calendar
Two requirements are well established for privately rented homes in England and both are date-driven, which makes them easy to run properly and embarrassing to run badly.
- EICR at least every five years. Under the Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020, privately rented homes in England require an Electrical Installation Condition Report at intervals of no more than five years, with remedial work carried out where the report requires it. The report itself is a set of coded observations rather than a pass or fail, and the codes are what decide whether you have work to do — our guide to EICR landlord requirements in London explains them.
- Annual gas safety check. Under the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998, gas appliances and flues require an annual safety check by a suitably registered engineer, with a record provided to the tenant. See gas safety certificates in London for the detail.
Both have published prices, which means they can be budgeted rather than negotiated. All figures exclude VAT.
- Gas safety certificate — £85. Annual, fixed, and the same whether you ring in March or in the week before it expires.
- EICR — £150 for a one bed, £170 two bed, £190 three bed, £210 four bed and above. Five-yearly, and priced by bedroom count because that tracks the size of the installation being tested.
- EPC — £65 to £110 for a flat or studio, £75 to £140 semi-detached, £85 to £150 detached. Normally required when a property is marketed to let — confirm the current requirement and its validity period with your agent or solicitor rather than with a web page.
Note what those figures are not. The EICR price is the inspection and the report; if the report comes back unsatisfactory, the remedial work is a separate itemised quote, because nobody can honestly price a fix before they have found the fault. The gas figure is the check, not a service. Those two caveats are the whole of the small print, and any firm that will not state them plainly is worth a second look.
Set both as calendar entries with lead time, not as reminders on the expiry date. Access in Central London is the constraint, not availability — you may need three attempts to get into an occupied flat, and the last week before an expiry is a bad time to discover that.
Beyond these two, the framework around hazards, condition and disrepair in rented homes has been tightening, and the obligations differ by tenure and circumstance. That is a moving area and not one to take from a web page — get current advice on where your specific obligations sit.
At every tenancy changeover
The void between tenancies is the only period when you have unrestricted access, and it is systematically wasted. A flat between tenants is worth a proper hour rather than a glance.
- Run every tap and check under every one. Not just for flow — feel the trap and the isolation valve for damp. Cupboard leaks under basins are the classic slow failure and they are visible if you look.
- Check the seals and grout in the bathroom. Silicone at the bath-to-tile joint and around the tray is a consumable. It fails, water gets behind, and in a flat the consequence lands on someone else's ceiling.
- Test the extract fan properly. Not "does it come on" — does it actually move air. Hold a sheet of paper to it. Most fans in period flats are either blocked, disconnected from their duct, or venting into a void.
- Operate the stopcock. Find it, turn it, turn it back. A seized stopcock discovered during a leak is the difference between a small repair and a ceiling.
- Look inside the consumer unit cover — not to work on it, but to know what you have before the next inspection tells you.
- Check every window opens and closes and locks, particularly in older sash stock where the sashes swell and the cords fail.
- Photograph everything. A dated set of photographs at the start of a tenancy is worth more than any amount of argument at the end of one.
Twice a year, occupied
An inspection visit in an occupied flat is a different exercise. You are not going to lift floors. You are looking for the visible early signs of the four failures that dominate Central London flats.
- Black spotting on cold surfaces — window reveals, external-wall corners, behind furniture on outside walls, in the bathroom. This is almost always condensation rather than any exotic cause, and it is a ventilation and heating problem more often than a building fault. Our guide to damp and mould in Central London flats explains why misdiagnosis here is expensive.
- Staining on ceilings, particularly under the bathroom of the flat above or near a stack. Old, dry stains still matter — they tell you something happened.
- Failed sealant and moving tiles in the bathroom and kitchen.
- Sockets, switches and fittings that are loose, scorched, cracked, or have been added to by someone else. Any electrical work in a dwelling falls under Building Regulations Part P, with installations to BS 7671 — tenants' own additions are not covered by anything and are your problem.
Ask the tenant directly what is annoying them. The complaint they haven't bothered to report is usually the one that is quietly getting worse.
The seasonal jobs
Before the heating season is when heating problems are cheap. During it, they are urgent and everyone is busy. Get the boiler serviced ahead of the gas safety check date if the dates have drifted apart, bleed and check radiators, and confirm the heating actually comes on in every room rather than assuming.
Autumn is also when condensation complaints begin, and they begin because heating patterns change and windows stop being opened. If a flat has a history of it, the intervention is before October, not in January when there is already mould on a wall and a tenant with a phone full of photographs.
Central London specifics that don't apply elsewhere
A rental in W1, W2, NW8 or W9 carries constraints a suburban house does not, and they change the maintenance calculus.
- You may not own the problem. In a flat, the roof, the stacks, the risers, the external fabric and often the windows sit outside the demise. If damp or a leak originates there it is usually the freeholder's to fix — but the boundary is set by your specific lease and must be checked against it, not assumed.
- Nearly everything needs consent. Alterations, moving waste runs, changing floor finishes and structural work typically require freeholder or managing-agent consent, often a formal licence to alter. Doing the work first and asking later is the most expensive sequence available.
- Access is genuinely hard. No parking, a small lift, a porter to satisfy, restricted hours. Every job costs more time here than the same job in Zone 4, and a contractor who doesn't know that will discover it on your job.
- Your tenants expect prime standards. At these rents, a patched repair that looks like a patched repair is a complaint. The finish is part of the fix.
- Communal costs land on you. If the block undertakes major works, the leaseholder pays, and Section 20 consultation is the process you'll see it through. Budget for the possibility rather than being surprised.
The records worth keeping
A landlord's paperwork is not bureaucracy for its own sake — it is the only thing that answers a question asked two years later, usually by someone who is unhappy.
Keep certification and its expiry dates somewhere you will actually look. Keep dated photographs from every void inspection, because they establish the condition of the flat at a point in time better than any inventory prose. Keep a note of every report a tenant makes and what you did about it, including the ones you decided needed nothing — a documented decision is defensible, a forgotten message is not. Keep the invoices and reports from any trade who attended, with photographs of what they found.
Keep the lease itself accessible, because half the questions that arise in a flat are answered by it and nobody can ever find it when it matters. And keep a simple running record of the flat's history: what has leaked, what has been replaced, when the boiler went in, which corner gets condensation. That history is what makes the next problem quick to diagnose instead of an investigation from scratch.
What to do when a tenant reports something
Two rules save most of the money. First, respond quickly even if you cannot fix quickly — most escalation is caused by silence, not by delay. Second, get a photograph before you get an opinion. A picture of a stain, a fitting or a leak, sent by the tenant on the day, tells a competent trade more than a paragraph of description and often determines whether it is urgent at all.
Anything involving water and anything involving electricity is worth treating as urgent until proven otherwise, because both cause damage to other people's property, and that is the category of problem that gets legally interesting. Everything else can usually wait for a planned visit — and planned visits are where you save money, by batching several small jobs into one attendance instead of paying for three.
How we work with landlords
Most of what is on this list is small work, and small work only makes sense at a price you can decide on without a negotiation. Our maintenance visits, plumbing and electrician call-outs start from £80. Compliance is fixed: gas safety certificate £85, EICR £150 to £210 by bedroom count, EPC £65 to £110 for a flat. Painting and decorating labour runs from £1,400 for a 1 bed to £2,200 for 4 beds and above, bathroom installation labour is from £2,800, and a flat-pack kitchen installation from £1,300. All prices exclude VAT, and larger refurbishment is by quotation. You get a fixed itemised quote before anything starts and one point of contact throughout.
The reason those are published rather than quoted on the day is the argument this whole page makes. Maintenance only gets done when it is easy to decide, and a landlord will not raise a job that requires a phone call, a negotiation and a wait to find out what it costs. Small work at a known price gets done in March. The same work at an unknown price gets done in December, by which time it is not small.
Send a photograph of whatever your tenant has reported and we will tell you what it is and what it costs to put right. Get in touch with the details, and see the areas we cover across Central London on our areas page.