People arrange a maintenance contract hoping to buy peace of mind. What they usually buy is a document that says very little and an invoice that arrives whether anything happened or not. Then, when something does go wrong, the argument turns out to be about exactly the things the contract never addressed: whether that job was included, how fast someone should have come, who was supposed to let them in, and why nobody knew.
A maintenance arrangement is a good idea. But it is only worth anything if it resolves the operational questions in advance. Below is what a sensible one covers, and why each part matters more in Central London than it would elsewhere.
Reactive and planned are not the same product
The first distinction to get straight is what the arrangement is actually for, because the two halves are judged by completely different standards.
Reactive work is the response to something that has broken. A leak, a dead circuit, a failed boiler, a jammed window, a fault a tenant has reported. It is judged on responsiveness and, more importantly, on diagnosis — whether the person who attends works out what is actually wrong rather than treating the symptom.
Planned work is what you do because you decided to, on a date, before it fails. Certification, servicing, sealant and grout renewal, extract fan checks, valve and stopcock exercise, redecoration. It is judged on programme and finish.
Most portfolios are almost entirely reactive and then find their costs are unpredictable and their emergencies frequent. The single most valuable thing a maintenance arrangement can do is shift a portion of the work from the first column to the second. A stopcock exercised on a Tuesday costs a fraction of a stopcock discovered seized during a leak, and a fan checked in September prevents a mould complaint in January.
Scope: what is in, and — more importantly — what is out
Vagueness in scope is not generosity, it is a future dispute. A contract that says "general maintenance" has said nothing.
The boundaries that need to be explicit:
- Which properties, and what happens when the portfolio changes.
- Which elements — is the boiler in, are white goods in, are windows in, are floor finishes in?
- Demise versus communal. In leasehold blocks this decides who is even entitled to instruct the work. A contractor cannot repair a communal stack on your instruction just because the leak shows in your ceiling.
- Attendance versus repair. Attending, diagnosing and making safe is a different thing to fixing, and one of them can be done on the first visit while the other frequently cannot.
- Parts. Whether materials sit inside the arrangement or are quoted separately. In prime stock this matters enormously, because the fittings are not standard and a matching replacement may need to be sourced rather than bought.
- Specialist work. Where the job needs a specific trade or a specific certification, who arranges it and who carries it.
Where a job crosses into alteration rather than repair — moving a waste run, changing a floor finish, touching structure — you are no longer in maintenance at all. That is refurbishment territory and it typically needs freeholder consent, often a licence to alter. A maintenance arrangement should say plainly that it stops there.
Response expectations, honestly stated
Every maintenance contract has a section about response, and most of them are fiction. The useful version does three things.
First, it defines the categories properly. "Emergency" should mean something specific — uncontrolled water, no heat or hot water in winter, an electrical fault, loss of security — and not simply whatever the caller says it is. Everything else is urgent or routine, and both are legitimate.
Second, it states what response actually means. Attendance is not resolution. A contractor who attends a leak within the hour, isolates it and makes it safe has done the job even if the repair takes three days to source a part. A contract that promises "resolution" within a fixed window is promising something outside anyone's control.
Third — and this is the part almost nobody writes down — it acknowledges the things that determine response in Central London and are nothing to do with the contractor: whether anyone can get into the flat, whether the porter will allow access, whether the block permits work at that hour, and whether a vehicle can get within a reasonable distance of the door. An arrangement that ignores those is measuring the wrong thing.
Access: the clause that decides whether any of it works
The most common cause of a maintenance arrangement failing is not the trade. It is a locked door.
What needs settling once, in advance, rather than repeatedly in the moment:
- Where the keys are and who is authorised to release them.
- Whether the contractor may hold keys, and on what terms.
- Who contacts the occupier, and how much notice they get.
- Who tells the porter. In portered blocks this is a standing requirement, not a courtesy — see our guide on porter access for mansion block works.
- What the block's rules are — permitted hours, which lift, protection requirements, waste routes. Blocks often impose hours stricter than the council does, which is covered in our guide to working hours restrictions in Westminster.
- What happens on an aborted visit. Agreed in advance is a term. Agreed afterwards is an argument.
Reporting: assume every note gets forwarded
The output of a maintenance visit is not just the repair. It is the record. That record ends up in front of leaseholders at service-charge time, in front of tenants in a dispute, and occasionally in front of a solicitor.
So the reporting standard worth agreeing is: photographs before work as well as after, a plain-English description of what was found and what was done, an explicit statement of the cause where it is known, a note of anything seen but not in scope, and a separate quote for further work rather than an assumption. It should be forwardable without editing. If you have to rewrite the contractor's note before you can send it on, the reporting has failed.
For agents running this across a portfolio, our page for estate agents and our guide to maintenance for managing agents go further into what that looks like operationally.
One point of contact
This sounds soft and it is the most practical clause in the document. A portfolio maintained by whoever happens to pick up the phone is a portfolio where nothing is remembered. Nobody knows that this flat has done this before, that the stopcock in that building is in an odd place, that the flat above has a history, that the porter needs a day's notice.
A named contact who carries the history of your properties is worth more than a faster nominal response time, because most of the time saved on a job is saved before anyone arrives.
Compliance sits inside the calendar
Two obligations are well established for rented homes in England and belong in the planned column of any arrangement covering let property: an EICR at least every five years under the Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020, and an annual gas safety check under the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998. Both are date-driven and both are easier with lead time, because in Central London the constraint is access rather than availability.
Other obligations around condition and hazards in rented homes have been changing, and what applies depends on tenure and circumstances — take current advice rather than relying on a fixed list in a document written two years ago.
The traps
- Paying a retainer for an unspecified promise. If you cannot say what the money buys, it buys availability, and availability is worth less than it sounds.
- Response times nobody can meet. A number in a contract that the operation cannot deliver just relocates the argument.
- No scope boundary. The reason "is this covered?" is the most common maintenance question is that most contracts never answered it.
- Variable pricing on small work. If every small job needs a fresh quote and a negotiation, small work doesn't get done, and small work not getting done is how you get big work.
- A contractor who doesn't know blocks. Competence with a pipe is not competence in an occupied mansion block with a porter, a lift and a resident below.
How we do it
We keep it simple, because the complexity in this market is usually there to hide something. Our published services carry set prices — maintenance, plumbing and electrical work from £80, bathroom refurbishment from £2,800, refurbishment by quotation — and every job gets a fixed quote before work starts, so you approve a number rather than receive one.
You get one point of contact who knows your properties, a fixed price you can plan and recharge against, and trades who understand how Central London buildings work. If you want to discuss an ongoing arrangement across one property or several, send us the details and we will tell you what makes sense.