HMO management
What's included in HMO management?
The management fee covers the running of the property. Work carried out on it — repairs, certificates and letting rooms — is charged separately and always agreed with you first.
Collecting the rent.
Per-room ledgers, arrears chased on a fixed timetable, monthly statements.
Compliance and certificates.
Gas, EICR, EPC, fire alarm and emergency lighting, licence expiry — every date tracked, every renewal booked before it lapses, every certificate held on file. Deposits protected with the Tenancy Deposit Scheme. Right to Rent checks and Renters' Rights information sheets served on time. The tracking and the paperwork are included. The certificates themselves are charged at the rates on our fee schedule.
Repairs and contractors.
We take the call, arrange access, instruct the contractor and see the job through. Contractor invoices are passed to you. We agree anything above [your authorisation limit] with you before instructing.
Inspections.
Quarterly on HMOs, six-monthly on single lets, with a written photographic report each time. Included.
The winter visit.
Once a year before the heating season. Radiators bled, seals redone, extractor fans cleared, appliance filters serviced, batteries replaced. Included.
Ending tenancies.
Check-out against a photographic inventory, deposit handling, turnaround between tenants.
Out of hours.
Emergency cover, 365 days a year.
Letting rooms is charged separately at £150 per room, inclusive of advertising, viewings, referencing, Right to Rent checks, the tenancy agreement and check-in. We charge it when a room is let, rather than building it into the monthly fee.
How we reference room tenants
Every room tenant is referenced with a previous landlord reference, photo identification, a Right to Rent check and proof of income before they move in.
Enhanced referencing — a credit search and affordability assessment through a third-party provider — is available at £35 per tenant. We don't run it on every room by default, because on a £300 deposit and a five-hundred-pound-a-month room the cost of checking every tenant that way rarely earns its keep. On a six-bed house turning over several rooms a year it adds up quickly.
It is your call, and we will ask you before the first tenancy rather than assume. Whichever you choose is recorded in your management agreement.
How we run our HMOs
We have been letting our own HMOs for over a decade. Everything below started as something we did to our own houses, usually after paying to fix the thing it now prevents.
That is not a complaint about tenants — it is how shared houses work. The job is to plan for it rather than be surprised by it.
In a shared house, nobody empties the vacuum, nobody clears the washing machine filter, nobody turns the heating down and nobody changes a battery when the light starts flashing.
The winter visit
Every managed HMO gets a winter visit before the heating season. It isn't an inspection with a clipboard. It's a morning of practical work that stops small things becoming expensive ones.
- Radiators bled and the heating checked before it's needed, rather than after it fails on the coldest night of the year
- Bathroom and sink seals re-masticked, because failed mastic is how water gets behind tiles and into the floor below
- Extractor fans vacuumed out. A blocked fan doesn't clear moisture, and moisture is how mould starts
- Kitchen extractor deep cleaned — grease builds up faster in a shared kitchen than anyone expects
- The vacuum cleaner emptied and serviced
- Washing machine and dryer filters cleared, both serviced
- Lock and alarm batteries replaced
The last few sound trivial. They save the most money. Appliances in shared houses fail years early because their filters are never cleared, and they get replaced at the landlord's cost. Twenty minutes in November prevents most of it.
Since Awaab's Law came into force in May 2026, extractor fans that actually work have gone from good practice to legally material. In the Victorian terraced stock that makes up most of the HMO market in Leeds and York, that matters.
The winter visit is included in management. We don't bill it separately.
Keypad locks, not keys
We fit smart keypad locks. Tenants get a code rather than a key, which they prefer, and it removes a whole category of problem before it starts.
Nobody gets locked out at midnight, so nobody needs an emergency locksmith at emergency locksmith prices. There are no keys to cut, lose or argue about at the end of a tenancy. When a room changes hands we change the code rather than the lock. When a contractor needs access we issue a temporary code instead of arranging to meet them with a key.
We choose locks that still open from the inside without a code, so escape routes stay compliant.
Spare batteries live in the house, and there's a 9V battery on the notice board. If the lock runs flat because nobody acted on the warnings, it can be powered from outside for long enough to get the door open. Nobody stands in the rain waiting for us.
Smart locks cost around £200 a door, so this is an investment rather than a freebie, and we'll say so before you commit. On a house with frequent turnover the maths tends to work — an emergency locksmith is £100 or more a visit, a lock change between tenancies is £60 to £120, and cutting keys for six tenants several times a year adds up on its own. On a settled single let it takes longer to pay back, and we'll tell you that too.
We recommend it. We don't insist on it.
Front door only is a sensible place to start.
Heating that runs itself
The heating runs on a schedule rather than on whoever last touched the dial. Tenants can boost it from the thermostat whenever they want, and it turns itself off two hours later. If the house gets too cold, it fires up on its own.
In a bills-included house, heating is the largest variable cost and the one nobody watches. A radiator running against an open window doesn't show up until the bill does. A schedule means the house is warm when people are in it and not when they aren't.
The self-triggering matters more than it sounds. A house that never drops below temperature doesn't get burst pipes in January, and it doesn't get the cold surfaces that condensation forms on. Both cost far more than the gas.
The system costs around £500 to install, so like the locks it's an investment rather than something we include. On a bills-inclusive house it usually pays for itself inside a winter — a house heated on a schedule rather than on whoever last touched the dial costs noticeably less to run, and one burst pipe avoided covers it several times over.
We recommend it on bills-inclusive HMOs. On a single let where the tenant pays the bills, the argument is weaker and we'll say so.
What this adds up to
None of this is complicated. It is a list of things that go wrong in shared houses, and a habit of dealing with each one before it does.
That is the difference between managing a property and owning one. We do both.
The compliance schedule for a managed HMO
Every managed property has these tracked with expiry dates and renewal reminders:
- Gas Safety Certificate — annual
- EICR — every five years
- Fire alarm testing to BS 5839
- Emergency lighting
- Fire door checksIncluded
- HMO licence expiry and renewal
- EPC
- Room size compliance
Fire doors are checked at every inspection — self-closers, seals, gaps and hinges — and recorded with photographs in your report. Repairs are quoted separately as they arise.