News
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Maximising the Quality of Repairs and Maintenance
July 21st, 2010
Having a team of skilled and reliable tradesmen (and women) is absolutely crucial for any Durham letting agent and for landlords who manage their own properties. In choosing the tradesmen that we work with, we use this checklist:
Skill and knowledge in their area of expertise; evidenced where appropriate by the necessary qualifications.
Reliability: in terms of doing the job safely and properly.
Time management: will they come at the time they’ve said they will and then get the job done within a reasonable timeframe?
Cleanliness: do they respect the effort that the landlord and tenant put in to keeping the property nice, doing their best to keep it that way?
Positive attitude: we need tradesmen who answer their phones at inconvenient times like 4pm on a Friday afternoon and who aren’t just interested in work that comes up at times that suit them.
Appropriate insurance: all our approved tradesmen have to provide evidence that they have appropriate liability insurance.
Cost effectiveness: we choose people who charge a fair price for their work but are not so cheap that they end up cutting corners and thus costing our landlords more in the long run.
Honesty and integrity: we can only work with people who we trust completely, confident that they will tell it to us like it is, however good or bad.
I’m sorry to say that the majority of letting agents choose their tradesmen as much by the level of commission that they get from them as they do by the kind of criteria outlined above. At Cathedral Lettings we believe that the monthly management fee you pay us should be sufficient remuneration for managing your property. We therefore neither seek nor accept commission on top of the tradesmen’s bill. What we pay for a job is what you pay for a job. We treat our tradesmen fairly and we pay them promptly, as all agents and landlords should.
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