Effective handover of property maintenance in social housing: top tips

For social housing providers, the process of procuring new compliance, maintenance and repairs contractors should not unduly impact the ongoing provision of services to residents and stakeholders. The Chartered Institute of Housing’s ‘Rethinking Repairs and Maintenance’ project provides a good starting point which you can find here.

The key to maintaining an effective property safety and maintenance programme lies in handover planning. Handover planning ensures continued compliance with legal and contractual obligations, but there are valuable contractual and operational ‘wins’ to effective handover planning too. After many years supporting social housing clients as both incoming and outgoing maintenance contractor, we know what constitutes best practice during the transition to a new supplier. We hope our pointers on contractual and operational issues, highlighted in this blog, may help social housing property management teams to smoothly onboard a new maintenance supplier.

Our top contractual tip stresses the benefit of a timely, agreed, and structured mobilisation plan. Above all else, this ensures that all client requirements are covered off. Racing to start a new partnership without understanding each other’s ways of working or without aligning processes puts the client- supplier relationship under unnecessary strain from the start - strain which some relationships don’t recover from. Mutually agreed mobilisation allows everyone to ‘get on the same page’ and understand the necessary processes and lines of communication. Supplier service delivery has to be ‘fit for purpose’ and good mobilisation agreements sets all service delivery expectations on the correct path. Where this is achieved, the client is far more likely to realise wider strategic and commercial benefits throughout the relationship.

Operational tips

A handover plan helps ensure that maintenance operations continue without interruption, especially where the incoming supplier operates services 24/7.  For example, a handover plan should focus upon a seamless transition of suppliers especially with respect to emergency alarm monitoring stations. It’s often the case that outgoing suppliers will cancel their services, including the monitoring of emergency alarms. If the new supplier is not made aware that the responsibility for alarm monitoring lies with them, the client’s properties and residents will be unprotected. Continuity in planned preventative maintenance (PPM) services can also be impacted by the change-over of suppliers. We’d always recommend that social housing providers share their asset list and current PPM status to an incoming supplier, early in the mobilisation phase. The new supplier is better placed, at an early point in the relationship, to align PPM services and correctly address the client’s priorities.

A well-planned handover process can help identify and address issues before they become more serious, and thereby avoiding additional maintenance spend or supplier downtime. For example, during the onboarding process with a new social housing provider who shared details of their monitored properties, we discovered that some alarm monitoring systems still relied upon PSTN analogue connections. We identified these problem sites early on, updating these systems within the first two weeks of onboarding, and saving our client increased costs further into the contract. For more about the UK’s PSTN switch off, take a look at one of our recent blogs here.

 Effective handover planning also improves communication and collaboration between stakeholders in the contract relationship. For a new supplier, this can lead to finding greater efficiencies within engineering and planning teams. Where new suppliers can ensure their engineers have the correct skills and equipment to service and fault-find from day one, the better the efficiency of service to the client. And we’ve found that best practice for enhancing contractual relationships lies in the early sharing of quality data on property assets, systems and maintenance schedules with new suppliers. The better the share on information, the better the contractual performance.

Thanks for reading. We welcome comments, feedback and suggestions for future safety compliance topics.