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Working for landlords and agents: one payer, forty addresses

Portfolio work is good work: repeat, predictable, and it fills the gaps between installs. It also breaks most systems, because those systems assume a customer is a person who lives at the address on the invoice. Here the person paying has never been to the property, the person letting you in is a tenant who is not your customer, and the address changes every job.

Anchor the history to the property

This is the decision everything else follows from. If the record hangs off the payer, then forty properties share one blurred history and nobody can answer a question about a specific flat. If it hangs off the address, the invoice can still go wherever it needs to go, and the boiler at number 14 has its own story.

Three parties, three different needs

• The agent wants to know it is booked and it is done, with a certificate attached, and they want it without ringing you.
• The landlord wants the compliance record and the bill.
• The tenant wants to know when someone is coming, and they are the only one who can let you in.

Most friction on this work is access rather than the job — a wasted visit costs a slot and nobody pays for it. Recording abortive visits as what they are, rather than absorbing them, is the only way that ever gets addressed in a contract review.

Recurring compliance work

Portfolio work is largely inspections that come round on a schedule: gas, electrical, alarms. What makes that manageable is the same thing that makes a service round work — the date belongs to the property, the reminder fires on its own, and what you see is a due list rather than a spreadsheet. See service contracts that renew themselves.

Certificates have to be findable by address

The question you will be asked is always the same shape: "have you got the certificate for flat 3?", often two years later and usually during a sale or a dispute. If the answer takes an afternoon of searching a shared drive, it is costing you on every portfolio you hold. Filed against the property, it is a search box. Quandron has templates for the Landlord Gas Safety Record (CP12), the Electrical Installation Certificate, Minor Works and the Benchmark commissioning checklist; the MCS certificate and the EPC come from their own bodies and are stored against the property rather than produced here.

Watch the margin

Portfolio work comes with rate pressure, and it is easy to accept because the volume looks reassuring. Whether it is actually paying depends on things the rate does not show: abortive visits, travel, the time spent chasing access. Costing it by job — see what the job actually cost — is what turns a renewal negotiation from a feeling into a figure.