6 Proven Tips to Save Time and Money on HMO Maintenance [Community Q&A]

In this episode, I want to talk about HMO maintenance. As an HMO investor and landlord, maintaining your properties is a big part of the job. It's something you’ll need to stay on top of for the long term. 

Good maintenance is key to keeping your business—and your HMOs—profitable. If you let it slide, it can quickly lower the value of your portfolio and undo all the hard work you’ve done finding great deals and refurbishing properties.

I’ll also be sharing some insights from our community about common maintenance problems, why it’s important to budget for maintenance, and the best ways to manage it.

And, I’ll give you six of my best tips to help you save time, reduce costs, and manage maintenance more easily.

Topics covered in this episode:

• 02:54 Why Maintenance is So Important
• 10:48 Common Maintenance Issues in HMOs
• 16:36 Best Practices for Managing HMO Maintenance
• 27:09 The Importance of Long-Term Planning

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Transcript

Andy Graham (00:02.67)

Hey, I'm Andy and you're listening to the HMO Podcast. Over 10 years ago, I set myself the challenge of building my own property portfolio. And what began as a short-term investment plan soon became a long-term commitment to change the way young people live together. I've now built several successful businesses. I've raised millions of pounds of investment and I've managed thousands of tenants. Join me and some very special guests to discover the tips, tricks and hacks, the ups and the downs, the best practice and everything else you need to know to start, scale and systemise your very own HMO portfolio.

Andy Graham (00:40.652)

In today's episode, I am going to help you save more time and more money by becoming an absolute master of your HMO maintenance. Now I get it, HMO maintenance is a bit of an unsexy topic, but trust me, as a landlord, as an investor, this is definitely going to be a big feature of your business. You'll know this if you've got an established portfolio and if you're just getting started, you're going to find out very quickly. So if you want to find out how I do this, and if you want to find out how our community members do this, make sure you stick around. Please sit back, relax and enjoy today's episode of the HMO Podcast.

Hey guys, it's Andy here. We're going to be getting back to the podcast in just a moment, but before we do, I want to tell you very quickly about the HMO roadmap. Now, if you're serious about replacing your income, or perhaps you've already got a HMO portfolio that you want to scale up, then the HMO roadmap really is your one-stop shop. Inside the roadmap, you'll find a full 60 lesson course delivered by me, teaching you how to find more deals, how to fund more deals and raise private finance, how to refurbish great properties, how to fill them with great tenants that stay for longer, and how to manage your properties and tenants for the future. 

We've also got guest workshops added every single month. We've got new videos added every single week about all sorts of topics. We've got downloadable resources, cheat sheets, and swipe files to help you. We've got case studies from guests and community members who are doing incredible projects that you can learn from. And we've also built an application just for you that allows you to appraise and evaluate your deals, stack them side by side, and track the key metrics that are most important to you. To find out more, head to theHMOroadmap.co.uk now and come and join our incredible community of HMO property investors.

Andy Graham (02:26.03)

Welcome back, gang! So today, I want to talk to you about HMO maintenance. I know it's not the sexiest topic in the world, but it's a really important one. As a HMO investor, as a HMO landlord, this is going to be a big feature of what you have to do and manage and keep on top of for a long, long time. It really is one of the key things that helps ensure that your business, your HMOs actually stay profitable. And if you let it slip, it can erode the value in your portfolio very, very quickly. All that hard work you've done finding great deals and refurbishing them can very quickly get dissolved if you don't keep on top of good maintenance. Now, what am I talking about when I'm saying not keeping on top of it? What is not being good at maintenance? 

Well, actually, if you're spending more time than you should, that's going to cost you. And if you're spending more money than you should, then that's absolutely costing you as well. If you're not doing it right, you're probably going to find that it upsets tenants. Sometimes tenants will end up moving out as a result of you not dealing with maintenance things appropriately and quickly enough and well enough and that can be really, really damaging for your business. So this is a really important episode. 

So what I'm going to do is share six of my best pieces of advice to help you manage maintenance and recover more time and reduce your costs as much as possible. And I'm also going to share some great advice and experience and opinions from our community members as well. I was actually prompted to record this by a post that Lewis, one of our community members wrote and shared.

It was great and a lot of people gave their advice and opinions. They really fed into it as well. And it was interesting to see the different types of opinions, how people approach it slightly differently and the different methods. And I thought this would make a really good, well-rounded, very unbiased episode to share with you guys. And hopefully this helps you in your business. 

So for context, let me start with the question that Lewis asked in the community. Lewis asked, “Look, I'm curious for landlords who either use an agent or self-manage, what is the most common maintenance problem that you experience? How often do you get maintenance problems and how much do you spend on maintenance?”

And the answers that came from our community members were really, really good. So I'm going to start by just sharing some of those. So to kick you off, and this one made me laugh. 

Peter Fleming, one of our regular contributors, quite simply said, “Maintenance is constant. I think a simple but powerful reminder of the ongoing demands of property upkeep” 

Andy Graham (04:43.798)

And absolutely true. It is a pretty constant requirement. Things ebb, they flow, but yeah, absolutely constant. And then I think Peter probably just left the room and returned to whatever he was doing. There were quite a few opinions shared on this one actually, and a couple of similar opinions. 

Caroline Patterson is a member who contributes regularly inside the community. And Caroline, you might remember, has been on the show before. She runs a fantastic business in Chester. She's won some awards and she was a great guest when we sat down and recorded a podcast together and to Nugent, another community member who is very much in agreement with Caroline on this, but Caroline sort of said something along the lines of issues such as leaks, appliance failures, wifi problems are all very regular issues. 

Caroline even went on to say that like actually bathrooms and issues in wet areas is kind of generally the most common one and usually kind of the most problematic one. And I think there's a huge amount of truth in there.

Caroline actually went on interestingly to say that she budgets actually about 15% of her income for maintenance. She actually keeps spare machines in stock to minimise tenant disruptions and save on call out fees. And I think that's really interesting. Caroline has a great portfolio, but you might think that keeping appliances in stock would be the sort of thing that would only be necessitated by an agent who has hundreds and thousands of HMOs under management. And actually I can really resonate with this because this is something that I have found hugely valuable over the years because appliances do break when it's something like a fridge, a freezer, and tenants have got food in there. If you can just get someone to whiz around, drop an appliance off, even if it's not in the place where it will permanently reside, they're really, really grateful for it. And it really does help save more problems that can come down the line. 

Especially if, for example, you get a maintenance engineer out and they need a part and then they've got to wait for that part to be delivered and then they've got to go back and then actually find it doesn't work. And very quickly actually, it's quite easy to leave tenants without appliances for a week or more, despite doing what you think is absolutely the best possible thing and even doing it very, very quickly. I've had that sort of an issue myself. Some really interesting advice shared by Jew and Caroline. Christine, a regular contributor in the community said that “very little maintenance is actually needed if you've done full refurbishing and you have good.”

Andy Graham (07:03.512)

tenants. I think that was obviously a really interesting approach. A proactive refurb strategy does help reduce long-term costs. Christian Hartley, another community member who contributes regularly. Christian said that he handles most of the maintenance himself and spends very little. So obviously doing it yourself and actually getting your hands dirty, rolling your sleeves up and dealing with maintenance stuff does mean you can avoid call out fees and potentially expensive tradesmen to do tasks that actually quite often easy to resolve if you just know how. I'm actually not one of the guys who knows how I'm so bad at maintenance. I'm terrible at DIY. In general, I'll tell you that as well. But a good example of a self-sufficient strategy, hands-on approach to managing minor repairs saves money. Not necessarily saving time though. I think that's an important one and obviously not a part of Christian's answer. Not saying it's wrong, but I'm just sort of highlighting that that is something that you perhaps want to think about yourself. 

John Rose said that “maintenance costs tend to rise with the age of a property.” Now that was a really interesting comment. think moving from sort of 1 % to 3 % of his rent to cover maintenance is what John was suggesting. Quite different to obviously what Caroline said, so might be dependent, maybe the number of tenants, the size of the property. And I'm not quite sure whether the guys are talking about gross or net rent, but something to think about. 

And it's interesting to hear people talking about a percentage of the rental income being set aside for maintenance. I think it does potentially highlight that actually different types of properties, the age, can actually impact the amount that you have to do. I would say that there is definitely some truth in that older properties, bigger properties, you've got all the pipe work and there's just roofs and gutters and things like that. You do just get more issues.

I don't think it's completely linear cause I think a lot of stuff is just some coincidental often in HMOs. It just sort of happens. I think often it's actually about, depends on who originally fitted it more so than actually how old it is. But there probably is some truth in there in all honesty. Nadim said that he budgets his 10% of rental income for maintenance and he uses home surf for basic repairs. Now that was really interesting cause Nadim was actually the only person who referenced.

Andy Graham (09:22.498)

third party companies that he's almost subscribed to on a call out basis. So if you're not aware of who home server a little bit like British gas cover, you can get these sorts of covers with LNG, like insurers. But basically you subscribe to one or more companies that offer certain services that will cover both emergency stuff and non-emergency stuff. Usually it's kind plumbing and repair and maintenance stuff. And depending on how much you're prepared to spend will determine how much cover you can get.

I think this is a really interesting one and depending on where you live in relation to your properties, depending on how involved or uninvolved you like to be, depending on the sort of team that you might have or not have to help you manage your properties, it's a really good solution. I guess you've got to look at the overall costs. What is the cost of that service on an annual basis versus what you might spend yourself or doing it with your own of subcontracted team and make a decision based on that. But there are a few interesting things that feed into that decision and definitely not a bad idea for some people. 

Louis, I'll just share one more comment. Louis stressed almost the variability of maintenance and kind of just said, there's so much stuff that can happen. There isn't one single thing that happens most regularly. Kind of depends on the property and the tenant type, which obviously a few other people said we had loads more opinions shared and it just made for a really interesting conversation. And it's great to see actually that so many people are willing to share their ideas. And actually there was some stuff in there that even I hadn't really thought of in necessarily the same way. I think I agree with all of that. 

Do you know what I think the single biggest kind of maintenance issue is? I think it is wifi. Seriously. If the wifi goes down, it is kind of backs to the wall time. It upsets people so much if they can't access the wifi, but you can understand why can't you? Everybody's trying to connect their phone, their tablets, their laptops, they've maybe got work to do. They want to socialise. They want to download and stream. They want a game.

It really, really does upset people if the wifi goes down. And obviously there are a few reasons why the wifi can go down. Sometimes it's not a you issue. It's a server or a provider issue. Sometimes it is a bit more of a you issue. And when I say it's a you issue, I mean, it's a bit more of a, the signals not getting around the house. Maybe there's not enough bandwidth to supply all of the devices. Sometimes even the settings on the router limit the number of devices that can connect. And that's the sort of stuff you

Andy Graham (11:46.046)

absolutely want to be on top of, it can really, really, really upset tenants very, very quickly. And actually it's the sort of thing that will, if you've not got a very thick skin, this stuff can really stress you out. So definitely the sort of thing that you want to make sure that you're able to attend to. But it's interesting because times have changed a little bit. Now, when I think about maintenance, I usually separate it into different categories. This is the sort of information that we share in our welcome pack. This is the information that we hand out at the beginning of any tenancy agreement. And it's really good to help manage expectations with tenants. 

If you want to get your hands on my welcome pack, just head to theHMOroadmap.co.uk and it's there in the resource section. It's sort of a 12 or 15 page document covering lots of things. One of which is maintenance and just sets expectations. But emergency stuff. Well, emergency stuff is anything that puts either the tenant or any of the tenants or the property at risk. So of course that would be things like a gas leak. That would be things like an open source water leak, fire, theft, criminal damage, unsecured doors or locks, security issues, that sort of thing, genuine emergencies and our policies, they must be dealt with within 24 hours. Now, what you've got to think about is what do you do if you weren't around, if you're the sort of person who is doing this yourself, actually, can you deal with this kind of thing at 24 hours notice? Now let's say it's a lock that's broken and the tenants can't lock the door. That's a security issue and I think that absolutely needs dealing with.

And that's the sort of thing that you probably would just call a locksmith for, get a locksmith around out of hours, bring a lock. You're going to pay for the service, but the tenants are secure. Costs kind of goes out the window a little bit when it's an emergency, way more important that you just get it dealt with and you get it dealt with properly. If you know how to fit locks, you've just got spare locks lying around and you've got the time to do it and the know-how then great. You could do it yourself, but you've got to be able to do it at that short notice, right? Things like gas leaks, water leaks. There's certain things that tenants can and can't do. Tenants can obviously turn the stop clock off.

Tents can obviously shut the gas off, but they need to get out of the house if it's a gas leak and they need to call the national grid. And if it's a leak, they need to keep the water off and they're not going to be able to have showers and stuff like that, are they? And use water at the taps. And you're going to have to figure out very quickly how to resolve that depending on where that leak is coming from. We'll determine how long that's going to take. So the emergency bit is kind of dealing with it very, very quickly, stopping the threat, the risk for the damage or the potential for anybody to get hurt.

Andy Graham (14:09.302)

and then moving forward from there and putting an action plan in place. So we actually put some information on the notice board. If that notice board goes on the right at the front door or the main access route and tenants can actually remind themselves if they need to a very short notice where the stock is, where is the gas shut off off? Where is the electricity board? Those sorts of things. What number should I actually call in an emergency? If I'm gonna get your hands on my notice board template again, that is inside thehmoroadmap.co.uk. It's in the resource section and you can go and grab a copy and put your own brand and information on there as well. That's the emergency stuff. 

There's then sort of urgent stuff. Urgent stuff is stuff that needs resolving in two to three days, an oven breaking. It's really, really frustrating, isn't it? But actually it's pretty urgent. Tenants can use a microwave and the hob in the meanwhile. They may even be able to go and get food out and elsewhere. And you may want to just think about supplementing them with a little voucher or something like that. But these things do happen.

But think three to five days to get something like that resolved is about right. Now that meant me getting someone out to go and look at it and appliance. A lot of people in the comments talked about appliances. I regularly am getting appliance stuff sorted myself in my houses. You might need a part. You might need a new appliance. That new appliance might need an electrician to fit. It depends. So I think that that's a really important one, irrespective non sort of things that aren't an emergency, but are urgent. You want to try and get done sort of within about three days, you need policies in place for that.

And then everything else, I think I would just put down to urgent. So urgent would be that there's a loose door handle, those sorts of things. The carpet has come away a little bit, those sorts of things. The furniture, the IKEA furniture has just come a little bit loose. It needs sorting out. Those are kind of the non-urgent things. And we say to our tenants that we'll get them done within four weeks. But of course we always try get them done as quickly as possible. The job gets raised. We send someone out as soon as they are free, but we need to be able to communicate that and have some sort of a framework to share with our tenants. But all of the things that our community members mentioned in the post and there are experience and advice. 

I have also experienced and more. The thing is with maintenance, it's so expansive. There's so much that can happen and often will happen. You do need to be prepared for almost all eventualities. So what I thought I would do is share my kind of six pieces of advice, almost best practice advice. This is based on managing my own stuff for almost 20 years now managing an agency of thousands of tenants, lots and lots of properties. So you can build

Andy Graham (16:36.032)

your own highly efficient portfolio or business around this very simple advice. You can definitely save yourself time and you can definitely save yourself money if you do this stuff. So the first thing to acknowledge is that maintenance is unavoidable. Despite all the bits of advice that I'm going to share with you and that you can pick up from the community, it will happen. No matter how good you are at managing maintenance, it will still happen.

Not worth getting stressed about it. It's not worth getting frustrated about it. It's not worth trying to resent anyone or anything. Running properties and managing bricks and mortar does require some moving parts and those moving parts do break from time to time. You know, it's no different running a digital business, software businesses, things break and you've got to fix them. And yet sometimes someone may have been able to do something better. Maybe something was missed or something was overlooked. But what I'm saying is it is a mechanical business and because there are moving parts and there's lots of chains to the process. Things can break, the chain can break and it's worth just setting yourself an expectation to say that, you know, what this is going to happen and this is how we're going to deal with these things when they do happen. So that's the first thing that I just wanted to absolutely clear up. Cause I think there is a bit of a misconception from people that are not yet managing HMOs, but just getting started that if you do a refurb and everything's sort of looking nice and shiny new, then there'll be no problems.

And actually that's absolutely not the case. Properties just need maintaining. So you need to be prepared for that and you need to set realistic expectations of yourself and with everybody else involved. The second thing that I want to say is that consistency is hugely important here. Now I would recommend that you do checks of your properties, both internally and externally between one and every three months. Now every month is quite excessive and it's quite intrusive on your tenants.

I would only do that or recommend you do that if you are having some issues, if you're keeping an eye on something in particular or a group of tenants or a particular tenant and you have good reason to want to check it more regularly. I'll give you some examples. In COVID, we had an awful lot of wear on the properties because of course all of our tenants were living in the properties and they were doing everything in the properties. They were spending so much more time inside the properties. And what we were realising was that actually our maintenance bills

Andy Graham (18:57.738)

started to rocket because everything was getting used so much more and we put a policy in place to inspect more regularly just to keep a closer eye on things. And we did it for a period of time and it was really, really helpful. There are some issues that actually you might want to just keep an eye on, a monitor, and rather than leaving it three months to monitor, you might just want to pop back every month. There are some issues that you will come across and the best policy is actually just watch and wait, but you need to watch very carefully and not wait too long. So you can...

Take a slightly different approach to different problems, but I would definitely say that the maximum, when you're talking about general sort of maintenance checking every one month and the minimum every three months, every quarter. And the good thing is if you're getting into your properties at least every three months, you're making sure that anything that could become an issue doesn't become a major issue. It's really important that you are proactive and this consistency piece is about being proactive. getting in there and you're looking for issues before they become issues, little weeping from a tap or from under the sink. 

That's absolutely the sort of thing that could turn into a full blown leak and go straight through the first floor to the ground floor, take out kitchen with it be a real problem. You just want to be keeping an eye on that sort of thing. Silicon that's not looking like it's in the best condition that needs a bit of TLC. Actually, if you don't deal with that and it does crack a lot of weight in maybe on a shower tray and all of a sudden that is leaking down on a tenant in the bedroom beneath and that's going to be really disruptive for everybody, isn't it? 

So those sorts of things, just making sure that you're consistently looking and keeping an eye on and reporting on things well is really, really important in my opinion. The third idea I want to share with you today then is that you should be budgeting for maintenance. You should be setting aside a portion of your rental income to make sure that you're always prepared for something and especially the unexpected stuff. There's some stuff that is expected. I guess you kind of throw in your certificates and general upkeep.

Refreshing, but certainly the unexpected stuff, the things that break, you definitely need a bit of a budget set aside for that. That's no good. If you're dipping your hands into your property account every month and taking every last penny, because then all of sudden, if you need to pay for something and it could be quite expensive, that's going to be really problematic. I'm going to share an example actually from this very week as I record this podcast that happened in one of my properties. A lot of my students have moved in, so there's a bit of a settling in period in early September.

Andy Graham (21:25.28)

And early October and one of my properties, obviously all the tenants have moved back to university and started using the showers a lot more. And we've had a couple of issues simultaneously. One of the issues we've had is that the boiler is broken. The boiler has just gone down, no hot water. And one of the showers in this particular house is a mains fed shower. So if the hot water, the boiler isn't working, then that shower doesn't work. Simultaneously at the exact same time, the other shower, big shower, with a big walk-in shower, but it's an electric shower that has also leaked and it's leaked down onto a tenant's bedroom and all of their personal belongings below. 

For two completely different reasons, both showers in that house are completely out of use. And it's a complicated one because the boiler needed reviewing and that boiler then needed a number of parts. And then that person has got to get the parts, then come back, fit the parts, then test it and get it all up and running. That's not a process that can happen quickly. That's the sort of thing that I would put in my urgent category. We're trying to get that done within three days. We're trying to get a solution, but it might not be that we can completely resolve it because there is a chain of events that have to happen. But once that chain of events starts, we're getting it done as fast as it physically can be done. The other shower was a bit more problematic in that the reason that that one was leaking was behind the wall, behind the tile. So the feed to the shower itself had failed. 

That water had saturated the back of the shower, the boarding behind the shower, and that at all then found its way down into the tenants room beneath. And we were in that very difficult predicament. What could we do? We couldn't use the mains fed shower and we couldn't use the electric shower. And I literally had to provide an alternative solution for a number of days. I actually got the tenants a room in a local hotel that they could all use with agreement with the hotel for showers. Now, not every landlord would do that, but I think expecting our tenants to go

 not have showers for several days just simply isn't fair. 

And I think they were really grateful that we did that. And my biggest anxiety was that actually that my team wouldn't be able to resolve either issues quickly. And they could be more like a week, 10 days without showers, which would be very, very, very difficult to managing. Absolutely unfair. So it was the sort of problem that I wanted to get ahead. The reason I'm highlighting this one is because on this particular property, all of a sudden I had a boiler issue to sort and a number of parts.

Andy Graham (23:48.856)

quite expensive. I also had basically an electric shower, a shower room that in part needed to be kind of ripped apart. All the tiles have got to come off. We've got to then resolve the boarding behind, put the tiles back on. Big messy job. That shower is definitely out of action for a while. And then as part of managing these tenants and this problem, I put them in a hotel room, which had a cost to it. Very quickly, I had quite a lot that I had to spend on just this one property. And this is why budgeting is so incredibly important. I think I would agree with Caroline. I think budgeting around 10 to 15 % of rental income for maintenance is a really good idea. So look, if you're making 3000 quid a month on your property and your rental income, I'd be banging about maybe 300 quid away at the very least. Now I think you can take a position on this depending on the age of your property and the types of tenants and also the pattern, the history, because there is a lot of insight that you can get from the history on particular properties, but I would certainly be suggesting you budget it. 

So come up with an idea that suits you well. And understandably, it's important that you probably need to take your money out of your property account as well to use it for reinvesting or spending. So you've got to find something that suits well for you. But I think budgeting is really, really important and it's good financial practice. Okay. The next idea I want to share with you is this idea of having a tailored strategy. Everybody's business is different. Everybody's goals and objectives and aspirations are different. 

Just going back to the ideas and the opinions and the experience that was shared by some of our community members. Some people self-manage and some people don't. Some people use companies like HomeServe and outsource everything because they want to be even further removed from the process. Some people spend or budget less. Some people budget more. There's lots of different things. Some people mention the age of the property and the tenant type. It produces a very different scenario, both for every property, but also for every landlord and investor. And I think it's really important that you come up with a tailored strategy to help you manage your properties in your portfolio as well as you possibly can. 

Now, a good framework, like the one I've highlighted, maybe inspecting properties every quarter between certainly every one to three months, making sure that you're doing the interior and the exterior. If you want to copy actually my maintenance inspection template form, you can get that from thehmoroadmap.co.uk it's in the resource section. You can literally go and download a copy of the form that I use every time.

Andy Graham (26:11.628)

My properties are inspected, a great reporting tool, but you need to have a tailored strategy and that way that you can communicate this to your tenants. You can communicate it to your team. You can make sure that you've got all of the people that you need around you and that they know how things need to work and you're prepared. Nothing's going to come out of you left field. Nothing's going to surprise you. There is a solution for every problem. And that's the really important thing to have. You've got to make sure that you've got a tailored problem that can deal with any scenario that crops up. 

I think once you've got that, you're absolutely golden. You'll find that over time you spend less money, you enjoy running your portfolio more. Everybody else is happier and less frustrated because things just get done more quickly and they get done better. I think that that stuff is all really, really important. And I think as we look ahead with the Renters' Rights Bill and tenants' expectations continuing to increase, I think it's really important that this is absolutely a policy and a procedure in our business that we're really on top of and able to execute really, really well. 

The last thing that I want to talk to you about today is long term planning. I think long term planning is so incredibly important. I talk about it all the time, don't I, when it comes to actually investing, what we're investing in, where we're buying, what we're doing to projects, the numbers, all of that stuff. But actually the way that we manage our properties as well. I think how we approach that and thinking about the long term is so incredibly important.

It was interesting to see a few people comment on this topic and say that new properties don't require as much. And actually there is some truth in that and maybe older properties do require a little bit more, but in my opinion, actually, it's generally to do with just the workmanship that has been done in that property irrespective of the age. Now I'll probably add a separate point on after this one, but I think long-term planning is really, really, really important. Long-term planning is you just getting in that property regularly on that consistent basis that I mentioned and keeping a note of things. 

There may be things that you know now, but don't need to do anything about now, but maybe in a year's time, it comes up on your calendar. You know that you're going to check something quite specifically. It might be that you need to get a drone up on the roof. It might be that you need to get someone up with a ladder and looking at all the gutters. These are the sorts of things that if they go wrong, can be incredibly expensive. So planning for that long-term is really, really important. I think also as well.

Andy Graham (28:36.578)

When you're doing the refurbishment, what you do with the refurbishment is really important. So can I give you an example? I know that walk-in showers look a lot better than showers that have trays and certainly trays that are elevated off the ground. But three, four, five, six, 10 years into that property, there is a very good chance that the silicon around some of the seals and the joints will potentially start to fail. At some point within a 10 year period, if you don't have an issue with a bathroom or a shower trap, I'll be gobsmacked. 

It almost always does happen over a period of time, but it's very difficult to access a shower trap under a walk-in shower because obviously you've got to take tiles off the floor, then floorboards and then get to that trap. It's really, really disruptive. Having a shower tray that is raised means you just simply pull the side panel off that tray. Super easy to access. It's not going to be out of action for any great length of time. It's not going to be particularly expensive to access and it's not going to be particularly expensive to reinstate and repair versus walking shower, for example, which yes, looks better, but long-term, is it the right thing for your business? 

Now I'm not here to tell you what is right or wrong. I'm simply just trying to point out that the more of these decisions that you make, the better and more efficient your business will be long-term. Now, of course there is some offset. Walk-in showers look better. You might be able to get a little bit more on the rent.

Maybe you can take that into consideration versus the additional maintenance that will not might, but will come further down the line. So just something that you should definitely be thinking about. I know I said that that was the last one, but this is the last one. It's using good quality tradesmen. You need to make sure that you're always hiring reliable, high quality tradesmen to help avoid repeat issues and making sure that the work is always done right. The first time. I know the temptation of getting people who are the most available and the cheapest, but trust me, that never gets you the best results. 

Usually you've got to kiss a few frogs before you do find your prince. It's not the easiest service in the world to find good handymen, good tradesmen to resolve the sorts of issues that we're talking about in today's episode, but it's actually really, really important. And it will significantly help you reduce the costs that you spend on upkeep and maintenance and it'll help you significantly reduce the amount of time that you have to

Andy Graham (31:00.138)

input to manage and oversee these sorts of issues and the consequences of not doing it, which could be upsetting tenants and then having to respond to complaints are potentially tenants wanting to move out. So make sure that you do spend time vetting and interviewing and meeting and testing tradesmen so that you only work with good quality tradesmen, reliable tradesmen, people with the right skills, the right experience to know how to fix things and how to do it properly.

So there we go guys. They are, I suppose, my best piece of advice that I could share with you on how to manage maintenance to both reduce the amount of time that you've got to spend in this part of your business and also to reduce your costs. But let me just recap for you. I think the first one I mentioned was consistency. Being consistent is incredibly important. Get in there and check your properties regularly. Inspect them. Go and get my inspection template from the HMO roadmap if you want. I said before that actually that maintenance isn't unavoidable. Set that expectation both with yourself and your tenants, build a policy and the procedure around the fact that this is going to happen. Make sure you know what to do and everyone knows what to do when it does happen. 

Thirdly, I said, you need to have a budget. You need to make sure that you are setting some money aside every month in your portfolio to cover this sort of thing so that when it does happen, it's out of the blue and sometimes a bit more expensive than you can access cash easily and very quickly to do it. 

I think the fourth idea I shared with you was making sure that you have a tailored strategy, simply picking up somebody else's maintenance policy and trying to replicate the same thing for every single property isn't going to work in every scenario. It's good to have a tailored strategy. Think about your tenants, think about your properties, think about what you want from your business and think about the people that you work with. That will really help make sure that you get the most from this policy in your business. And it'll help make sure that you save as much time as possible and you are as cost efficient as possible. 

The fifth idea I shared with you today was thinking long term, having that long term view on some of the decisions that you make when you're both refurbishing your business and actually running and operating this part of your business is really incredibly important. And finally, I said that you need to make sure you're using good quality tradesmen. Obviously that's a bit of a no brainer and those reliable individuals, those people who do it well will just again, help you save loads of time.

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loads of money that reduce the headache, the stress, and they'll make buying and renting property more enjoyable. It doesn't have to be a huge chore. So there we are guys. That is how I would recommend you can both reduce the amount of time you have to spend in your HMO business and both the amount that you have to spend in your HMO property business. If you think I've missed anything, come on over to the HMO community and share it with us. That is of course our free group in Facebook.

10,000 members now having conversations just like this. If you're not in there or you're in there and you're not getting involved, this is what you're missing. But come and let me know what you think. Share your advice, share your experience, share your opinions. We want to hear it. If you've enjoyed today's episode guys, can I ask you a quick favor before you go? Please, please, please just spend 30 seconds leaving a quick review in the show. You can do it on both Apple podcasts and on Spotify. It helps more than you could possibly know. It helps us continue to bring great guests on the show and it helps us understand whether or not you guys are finding it as useful as we think you are. 

And of course, if you are an investor yourself, if you want to level things up, then make sure you check out the HMO roadmap as well. I mentioned a few things in today's episode that you can get from the roadmap. There's loads more templates, downloadable resources, things that'll save you hours of time and thousands of pounds trying to generate and create yourself. It's there. Just download it.

Add your logo and your branding and off you go. Plus we've got about 80 case studies now from community members. See what our members have actually been doing with their projects, how much they've been spending, how they're performing, the before and after photos, all the videos are there waiting for you, master classes from our experts, the deal stacker and loads, loads more. Trust me, it's an absolute no brainer. It will cost you less than a price of a cup of coffee every single day. Can't say fairer than that. And it'll help you to no ends in your business. Really will help you save time and just speed up the process of building a really successful business. 

That's it guys. Thank you for tuning in today. And don't forget that I'll be right back here in the very same place next week. So please join me then for another installment of the HMO podcast.