A weekly compliance review for small letting agencies

Compliance slips one missed week at a time. A short, fixed review every Monday catches the drift before it becomes an expired certificate or a tenant chasing you. This is the routine, built for an agency with a few dozen to a couple of hundred properties, several landlords and one or two people doing the work, with a longer monthly check for the things a weekly glance misses.

Before you start: one view of every expiry

You need one view of every certificate with its expiry date, every open task with its due date, and every open maintenance job. If that takes more than a minute to assemble, fix that first, because the review depends on it. The view is only useful if every row carries a status that means one thing. These are the ones worth using:

• Valid: on file, in date, and the recorded result satisfies the requirement.
• Expiring soon: in date, but due within 30 days.
• Expired: past its date.
• Action required: in date, but the recorded result does not satisfy the requirement, such as an unsatisfactory EICR or an EPC in band F or G. A future expiry date hides these from any date-only list.
• Unconfirmed: on file, but nobody has confirmed the result, or the expiry date it should carry is missing. Treat it as unknown, not as fine.
• Missing: the property needs this certificate and nothing is on file at all.

Who owns what, across many landlords

With more than one person and more than a handful of landlords, “the team” owning compliance means nobody does. Give each property a named person responsible for its certificates, and write it down where everyone can see it. When an item is booked, it becomes a dated task for that person. Group properties by landlord so you can answer the question every landlord eventually asks, “where do my properties stand?”, without building a spreadsheet for the call. When someone leaves or goes on holiday, reassign their properties on the day, not when something expires.

The 30-minute weekly review

1. Expired and action required (5 minutes). Anything already past its date, or carrying a failed result, goes to the top. Book the engineer, record the booking as a task with a date, and note any access problem in writing. Where an EICR requires remedial work, the Electrical Safety Standards Regulations 2020 give 28 days from the inspection, or less if the report says so, and the written confirmation then goes to the tenant and the local council within 28 days of completing the work.
2. Expiring within 30 days (5 minutes). Each one gets an owner and a booking. For gas safety, a check done in the two months before the deadline is treated as done on the deadline under regulation 36A, so booking early does not shorten the next year.
3. Overdue tasks (5 minutes). Re-date them honestly or close them. A task overdue for six weeks is not a task, it is a decision nobody made.
4. Open maintenance (5 minutes). Anything awaiting approval or a contractor gets chased today; anything a contractor has reported done gets reviewed; anything finished gets closed so the list is true.
5. Gaps (5 minutes). Properties missing a required certificate entirely, which are easy to miss because there is no date to expire. New HMOs and newly added properties are the usual culprits.
6. Write it down (5 minutes). A short note of what was booked and what is still stuck, so next Monday starts from a record, not memory.

Exceptions and escalation

Most items clear in a week. The ones that do not need a rule for when they stop being routine:

• Access refused. Record every attempt: the date, how you asked, and the reply. For electrical inspections, the regulations say a landlord is not in breach if they can show they took all reasonable steps, and that a tenant refusing entry does not by itself require going to court. The written record of attempts is what shows reasonable steps.
• A landlord who will not approve the work. Put the requirement and the date in writing to them, once, with the certificate attached. If it is still stuck after a week, it goes to the agency principal, not back into the queue.
• No engineer available before expiry. Book the earliest slot, record it, and tell the landlord the dates in writing.
• Anything stuck for two weekly reviews running gets a named decision-maker and a date, in the note.

The monthly check

Once a month, spend an hour looking further ahead and wider than the weekly list:

• Look 90 days out, not 30, so gas, EICR and EPC renewals can be booked around the tenant rather than around the deadline.
• Go through every unconfirmed certificate and record its result and expiry, because an unchecked document is not evidence of anything.
• List next month's new tenancies. Each one needs the alarms checked on the day it begins and the current gas record given to the tenant before they move in (alarm regulations, gas regulation 36).
• Send each landlord a short statement of where their properties stand: what is in date, what is booked, and what is waiting on them. It turns a chase into a routine.
• Check that every property is under the right landlord and has a named owner on your side.

How to spot gaps before an inspector does

An expiry list only shows certificates that exist. A property with no EICR on file has nothing to expire, so it never appears. Decide which certificates each type of property needs (gas where there is a gas supply, an EICR and an EPC for every let home, a fire risk assessment for an HMO where one applies) and then look for properties that hold nothing for a requirement. Check it whenever a property is added, not just monthly. The certificate checklist sets out the requirements. Gaps matter beyond your own list: under regulation 3(3)(c) a local authority can ask for a copy of the EICR, and it must reach them within 7 days of a written request.

Make it hard to skip

• Put it in the diary at the same time every week and treat it like a viewing.
• Have the summary arrive by email on Monday morning so the review starts from the list, not from finding it.
• Keep the note somewhere the whole team can see; the point is that the next person does not rediscover the problem.

Verixad sends a weekly operational summary every Monday at 08:00 UK time (expiring documents, arrears, open maintenance, overdue tasks), and morning reminders only on days when something is urgent. The dashboard holds the expired, expiring and overdue lists this review works through; the compliance page flags properties missing a required certificate against rules your organisation sets; and the owners page shows each landlord's properties with what is behind, with a one-page report to print or export. See email reminders and the weekly summary, the gas safety checklist for the dates that matter most, the maintenance workflow for the repair side of the review, and how it works for letting agents.