Every landlord has the same two problems in a void: the flat is finally empty, and the clock is running. Empty is the opportunity — there is no household to work around, no one-bathroom constraint, no negotiating access. The clock is the trap, because a void has a cost per week and it concentrates the mind on speed at exactly the moment when some decisions genuinely need thinking about.
This page is about using the window properly. Not a list of improvements — a way of deciding what belongs in this void, what belongs in the next one, and what should never have been on the list.
Sort the work into three piles before you price anything
Must happen now. Compliance and anything that would fail, leak or cause a dispute during the next tenancy. This pile is not optional and it is not negotiable against the marketing date.
Only possible now. Work that genuinely requires an empty flat: floors, rewiring, a bathroom, anything that takes a room out of service. If it is on the five-year plan and it needs the flat empty, this void is when it costs least — because doing it later means either another void or a very unhappy tenant.
Cosmetic and deferrable. Decoration, a tired kitchen door, marks on a wall. These feel urgent because they are visible. They are the pile to cut when the calendar tightens, and they are usually the pile that gets prioritised because they are the pile you can see.
Landlords routinely spend a void on pile three and defer pile two, then find themselves doing pile two mid-tenancy at three times the disruption. Getting the sorting right is worth more than getting a keen price.
Compliance: the pile that does not care about your date
Rented homes in England require an EICR at least every five years under the Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020, and a void is the sensible time to do it — an inspection during a tenancy that produces remedial work means arranging access to fix things around somebody's life. If the report throws up C1 or C2 findings, those need dealing with, and dealing with them is far easier in an empty flat with the floors accessible. The inspection is a published price set by bedroom count — £150 one bed, £170 two bed, £190 three bed, £210 four bed and above, excluding VAT — and the remedials are the variable, which is precisely why you want them landing in an empty flat rather than a let one. Our electrician call-out is from £80 excluding VAT and work is carried out to BS 7671; electrical work in dwellings falls under Building Regulations Part P.
Gas: an annual gas safety check is required under the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998. The certificate is a published £85 excluding VAT. Align it with the void if the timing is anywhere near, because a check during a tenancy is another access appointment, another evening of texting a tenant, and another morning somebody has to be at home.
Do the arithmetic on that pairing once and you will never do compliance any other way. Two certificates, done on one visit in an empty flat, cost you nothing in access and nothing in goodwill. The same two done separately during a tenancy cost you two appointments, two notice periods, and a reasonable chance that one of them fails because nobody was in.
Then the things that are not statutory but become disputes: extraction that does not work, a shower that leaks slowly into the flat below, a stopcock nobody can find, and mould that will be blamed on the tenant within four months. Every one of those is cheaper to fix in an empty flat than to argue about in an occupied one. Our ventilation guide covers the mould conversation specifically — and it is worth reading before you repaint a ceiling you will be repainting again next year.
What the Central London stock does to this
A void in a mansion block is not the same exercise as a void in a suburban semi, and the differences all cost time rather than money.
There is no skip. Waste comes out in bags, through common parts that have to be protected first and cleaned afterwards, often in a lift that has to be blanketed and sometimes booked. Materials go in the same way. Working hours are frequently restricted, and noisy work may be confined to a narrower window still — which shortens the productive day without changing the labour content. Parking ranges from difficult to imaginary, so deliveries are planned rather than assumed. If a porter has to be present, the job runs at their availability.
Most leases also require freeholder or managing agent consent for alterations — typically a formal licence to alter — triggered by moving soil or waste, structural work, or changing floor finishes. Many freeholds in this part of London sit with large estates whose requirements and timescales vary considerably, so check your lease and ask early. If your void plan includes moving a bathroom, the consent process, not the building work, is what will set your date. That is the single most common reason a landlord's void overruns, and it is entirely avoidable by starting the conversation weeks earlier. See our licence to alter guide and consent guide. In period conversions, add the fact that nothing is standard and the strip-out tells you things the survey could not.
Specify for tenants, not for yourself
This is where landlords lose money quietly. A rental flat is used by people who did not choose the materials, cleaned by people who were not told about them, and turned over every year or two. The spec has to survive that.
- Porcelain, not marble. This is not a close call. Marble is porous, it etches, and an agency cleaner with a limescale spray will damage it permanently within a tenancy. Porcelain is indifferent to everything. Our marble versus porcelain guide sets out why.
- Tray and enclosure over a wet room in most cases. Simpler, faster, and a tray can be replaced without rebuilding a floor. A wet room is a lovely thing and it is a higher-variance thing above somebody else's ceiling. See wet room versus enclosure.
- Keep the bath in a family-sized flat. Removing the only bath narrows your tenant pool for no gain.
- Robust, replaceable, unfashionable. A neutral finish rents to everyone and can be repaired in a later void without matching an obsolete product.
- Extraction that actually extracts. The highest-return item in a rental bathroom, and the least glamorous.
- Sensible floors. Laminate is from £30/m², carpet from £20/m² and skirting from £20/m², excluding VAT — all robust rental choices; check the lease on floor finishes and acoustic requirements in a flat before you commit to anything hard.
- Decoration is the predictable line. Painting and decorating labour is from £1,400 for a 1 bed, £1,600 for a 2 bed, £1,800 for a 3 bed and £2,200 for 4 beds and above, excluding VAT. It is the one void item you can budget years in advance, because it recurs and it barely varies. A full redecoration every second or third tenancy, done properly in a void, is cheaper than a patch-and-touch-up every single time — and it photographs better, which is what actually lets the flat.
- Buy spares. A box of the tile, in the same batch, kept in the cupboard. In five years you will not match it, and one cracked tile will otherwise mean a new floor.
Sequencing to a hard date
An empty flat lets you run everything at once, which is the whole advantage — do not waste it. The order that holds:
- Survey the day you get the keys back, not the day the tenant is due. Everything downstream depends on knowing what you have.
- Order materials immediately. Lead times are the commonest cause of a blown void, and they are the one thing that does not care how empty the flat is. Nothing should start until everything is on site and checked for damage.
- Start consent before anything else if the plan touches waste, structure or floors.
- Strip out and first fix in one pass, all rooms together. This is the efficiency an empty flat buys you.
- Respect the drying times. Screeds, levelling compounds, tanking and grout have their own clocks and a hard date does not speed them up. Our bathroom programme guide covers where they land.
- Snag before you market, not after check-in. A snag found by a tenant becomes a complaint, an access appointment and a relationship.
If the kitchen and bathroom are both in scope, do them together — see sequencing a kitchen and bathroom refurb. And be realistic with the marketing date. A flat photographed mid-snag lets slower than a flat photographed finished, and letting a week later at the right rent beats letting now at a discount.
The economics nobody writes down
Void weeks have a cost, and it is easy to compute. What is harder to compute, and usually larger, is the cost of the work you did not do: the mid-tenancy emergency, the access appointments, the deposit dispute, the tenant who does not renew because the shower was never right. A flat that is properly sorted in a void is a flat that generates fewer calls for the next several years, and calls are where a landlord's time actually goes.
The other quiet number is turnover. A tenant who renews saves you an entire void. Tenants renew in flats that work.
Working with agents
If your agent is managing the flat, the void is a coordination problem as much as a building one: keys, access, the inventory, the marketing photographs and the check-in all have to land in the right order. It works best when one contractor holds the programme and the agent has one person to ring rather than three trades to chase. Our estate agents page covers how we work with managing agents, and our maintenance service covers the years in between.
How we run voids
Survey first, then a fixed quote against a defined scope, then work — so the price is agreed rather than accruing. One point of contact for the whole programme, our own trades sequenced in the right order, common parts protected and cleaned, and the flat left ready to photograph. The published prices, all excluding VAT: gas safety certificate £85; EICR £150 to £210 by bedroom count; painting and decorating labour £1,400 to £2,200 by bedroom count; bathroom installation, first and second fix, labour only, from £2,800; flat-pack kitchen installation from £1,300; tiling labour £55/m² or £70/m² by tile size; laminate from £30/m² and carpet from £20/m²; plumbing and electrician call-outs from £80. A whole-flat refurbishment is per quotation, and a fixed itemised quote is confirmed before work begins. Send us photographs and your check-in date and we will tell you what genuinely fits in the window.