Property Management
A Managing Agent's Real Job Is Keeping Dates Off the Floor
Gas safety runs annually, electrical every five years, fire risk assessment on review, lifts on a schedule of thorough examination. Add the supplier contracts underneath and a managing agent is tracking hundreds of expiry dates across a portfolio - in documents, on different cycles, with no single place that holds them.
A managing agent with forty blocks is not really managing forty buildings. They are managing several hundred dates.
Gas safety runs on an annual cycle. Fixed electrical installation reports run on a longer one. Fire risk assessments carry their own review dates and the actions inside them carry their own deadlines. Lifts sit on a schedule of thorough examination. Water systems have a risk assessment with a review interval. Asbestos records need reviewing where asbestos is present.
Underneath all of that sits a second layer that nobody counts as compliance at all: the cleaning contract, the grounds maintenance agreement, the lift maintenance contract, the door entry system, the insurance-broking arrangement, the accounting software, the portal the leaseholders log into. Each with a term, a notice period, and a renewal.
The first layer gets attention because a certificate expiring is visible and consequential. The second layer gets attention when the invoice arrives. Both are the same problem: a date sitting inside a document that nobody is holding.
Why portfolios lose dates rather than buildings
One building is manageable in a head. Forty is not, and the failure mode is specific: it is almost never the big obvious thing. Nobody forgets the gas safety inspection on the block with the boiler room they visit monthly.
What gets lost is the outlier. The one block with a lift when the other thirty-nine have stairs. The one site with a private pumping station. The single commercial unit on the ground floor of an otherwise residential block, on a completely different lease structure with completely different obligations.
Outliers lose their dates because a portfolio develops a rhythm, and the rhythm is built around what most of the portfolio needs. Anything that does not fit the rhythm depends on an individual remembering it, and individuals change roles.
This is the same structural reason a firm loses a supplier renewal: not the ones on the regular cycle, but the odd one signed for a particular reason two years ago.
The supplier layer nobody has a spreadsheet for
Most agents do keep something for the statutory dates. It might be a spreadsheet, it might be a module in the property management system, but the dates exist somewhere because the consequence of missing them is obvious.
Very few keep the same thing for supplier agreements, and those are the ones with money attached in a way the certificates are not. A grounds maintenance contract that renews automatically at an uplift, on a portfolio-wide agreement, is a real number. A cleaning contract that rolled over three years ago at terms nobody has looked at since is another.
The reason these get missed is worth naming plainly: the notice period on a services contract is frequently longer than the gap between noticing the invoice and the renewal. By the time the cost is visible, the window to do anything about it has closed.
One list, two kinds of date
The practical move is to stop treating these as two separate disciplines, because operationally they are one.
A certificate has an expiry date and a lead time - you want the next inspection booked before the current one lapses, not after. A contract has a renewal date and a notice period - you want the decision made before the notice window closes. Both reduce to the same question: what is the last day I can act, and who is acting?
Once you write it that way, a single list works for both. Column one is the thing. Column two is the date it expires or renews. Column three is how much warning you need. Column four is the last day to act, which is column two minus column three. Column five is a person's name.
Column four is the one that changes behaviour, and it is the one almost nobody has, because working it out means opening every document and reading the clause.
Where to start with forty blocks
- Start with the outliers, not the portfolio. List every site that has something the others do not - a lift, a plant room, a commercial unit, a private supply. That short list contains most of your risk.
- Pull the supplier agreements into the same place as the certificates. One location, whatever it is. Two systems means two things to check and one that gets skipped.
- Record the notice period, not just the renewal date. If the document does not state one clearly, that is itself worth knowing before you need it.
- Put the act-by date in the calendar. Not the renewal date, which is the day it is already too late.
- Name an owner per line. Portfolios survive staff changes; undocumented knowledge does not.
Renewly does the fourth step for the contract half of that list. It reads each agreement, pulls out the renewal date and the notice period, works out the last day you can act, and tells you before it passes. It is not a compliance system and it does not replace your certificate register - it handles the supplier layer underneath, which is usually the layer with no register at all.
Founder of Renewly. Over a decade in IT operations and vendor management across financial services and technology. LinkedIn