What is a written repair request?
The deregulation bill which plans to make revenge evictions illegal is back in the House of Lords this week for its final review before being passed onto the Queen for her Royal Assent.
Apart from dominating the trade media for the past couple of weeks, it has raised a lot of questions about certain aspects of the Bill.
For example, written repair requests.
What is a written repair request? What qualifies? What does it need to include?
Firstly, a written repair request needs to be (you guessed it)…written.
Nevertheless, tenants shouldn’t expect to write ‘broken boiler’ on the back of a fag packet and anticipate a reply. A request needs to be submitted using a method that can be easily tracked. For example, post and email.
You can also use social media, text messages and other informal platforms as well as more traditional methods, but they all have to be made clear that it is a written repair request.
As for content, there are no guidelines on what needs to be involved in the content of the request. This means that your tenant could send you something as simple as ‘broken boiler’ and it would hold as much weight as if they send you a small essay of what exactly is wrong with it and what is needed to be fixed.
Although this doesn’t seem to be a massive cause for concern to begin with, if all reports did in fact contain a decent amount of detail and even came with pictures, it would mean less wasted call outs; which wastes both time and money.
Britain is such a culturally diverse country; it is rare to find a letting agency that serves solely English speaking tenants. Therefore repair requests will not always be reported in English. If the agency doesn’t have a translator on hand, it can prove difficult to translate correctly.
The most efficient way for tenants to create a written repair request and the most effective way for you to receive one, is to have a digital solution. When a letting agent uses LettingFix it means that every written repair request will be in the same layout and easy to understand. It will come with detail, pictures and a focus and understanding of the issue and therefore speed up the process of repair for everyone.
This blog post doesn’t claim to have all the answers; much is still unknown when it comes to written repair requests, for instance; if a landlord receives a written repair request via SMS does that mean they have to reply using the same platform? We are sure all your questions will be answered before the law comes into affect. For now the only question for letting agents to answer is:
Will you come into the 21st Century with LettingFix?
This blog was first posted on LettingFix.
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