Colin Stokes, MD of Adiuvo, on what property managers should look for, and look out for, when lining up trades for the out-of-hours emergency list.
A leak at midnight, drains overflowing on a Sunday, a fire panel throwing a fault on a bank holiday; reactive maintenance out of hours is where a management company’s reputation is genuinely made or lost. Residents don’t remember how quickly you answered the phone during office hours; they remember whether someone competent turned up to stop their ceiling collapsing at 2am.
We’ve written before about the different models available for handling out-of-hours calls in the first place with options including in-house rotas, outsourced call handling, general messaging services and so on but picking up the phone is only half the job. The other half, and arguably the harder one to get right, is who you send. A brilliant call handler paired with the wrong contractor still leaves a resident standing in a flooded hallway.
So what should be on the checklist when you’re reviewing or building your out-of-hours contractor list?
Genuine 24/7/365 cover, not a mobile that rings out. Ask the question directly: what happens if your named contractor is on holiday, ill, or simply doesn’t pick up? A surprising number of “24-hour” contractors are really one or two tradespeople with a mobile phone. If there’s no backup layer, there’s no real cover.
Proper multi-trade reach. Your out-of-hours list should, at minimum, cover a plumber and roofer, heating engineer, an electrician, a locksmith, drainage team and specialist cleaners.
Accreditation and vetting you can actually check. Gas Safe, NICEIC, appropriate insurance levels, DBS-checked engineers; always ask for evidence, not assurance. This matters more out of hours, not less, because there’s rarely anyone else onsite from to check.
Site knowledge. Does the contractor or person taking out of hours calls know where your stopcocks are, how to get past your access system, and where the riser cupboards are?
A response time you can hold them to. “As soon as possible” isn’t a service level. A credible provider will give you a number; something like two hours in a city centre and four in a more rural postcode is a reasonable benchmark to hold contractors to.
Transparent pricing. Out-of-hours call-outs carry a premium, understandably but agree the structure in advance. Leaseholders and RMC directors are increasingly (and rightly) scrutinising service charge costs, and an unclear or inflated out-of-hours invoice is one of the fastest ways to lose their trust in the managing agent, even when the agent wasn’t the one who set the price.
Reporting back. You should know what happened, when, and what it cost, without having to chase for it. If the contractor can’t tell you that without a phone call the next morning, they’re not set up for professional block management work.
It’s worth repeating a few basics here that remain the single biggest lever a managing agent has for reducing the number and cost of out-of-hours callouts in the first place:
Stopcocks. Leaks make up around half of all the emergency calls we receive. Out of hours, a contractor’s first job is often to isolate the problem rather than fix it there and then, and nine times out of ten that means shutting off the stopcock. Make sure residents know where theirs is (or what one even looks like), and if it can’t be turned off or reached by residents, make sure whoever takes your calls knows exactly where it is and can direct contractors to it.
Access. If a contractor or a resident can’t get into the building, or into a riser, meter cupboard or access an external stopcock the emergency doesn’t get resolved no matter how good the contractor is. Codes, keys or a key safe: just make sure there’s a guaranteed way in.
Contracts and contact numbers for essential services. Lifts, alarms, communal boilers, vehicle access systems check they’re covered out of hours. It sounds obvious, but roughly 15% of the specialist companies we contact out of hours tell us they simply don’t attend outside normal working hours, and a general contractor usually can’t substitute for a specialist installation like a lift or a fire panel.
Dedicated out-of-hours numbers, PINs and codes. Many suppliers have an out-of-hours line that isn’t the one that comes up on a web search or their main switchboard message. Make sure whoever fields your calls has the right number, not just a number.
Fire and smoke alarm access. Whoever services your alarms, and whoever takes your calls, should know where the panels are and have any codes or keys needed to silence or investigate a fault.
Vehicle and pedestrian gate access. Codes, override keys or buttons – make sure directors or your call handler have these details for the inevitable evening the gate mechanism fails.
None of this is exotic as it’s the same due diligence any managing agent applies to daytime contractors. The difference out of hours is that nobody is there to catch it going wrong in real time, which is exactly why it deserves more scrutiny, not less.
It’s also worth being honest about where the gap usually sits. Plenty of buildings have decent call handling and a patchy contractor list, or vice versa with a good local plumber but nobody triaging whether the job actually needs him at 3am. The buildings that get out-of-hours right tend to be the ones where call handling and contractor dispatch are joined up: the same standards, the same reporting, one point of accountability rather than two organisations pointing at each other after the event.
That’s the thinking behind how we’ve built things at Adiuvo Group. Adiuvo handles the call triage and decision-making and knowing when a job genuinely needs a contractor versus when talking a resident through shutting off their stopcock will do. Renovo, our sister company, exists for the moment a job does need a van: a vetted, multi-trade contractor network now covering more than 95% of the UK. Renovo is there as backup when a building’s usual contractors can’t respond.
Whoever you choose, the building doesn’t care about the org chart at 2am only that someone competent, accountable and properly equipped shows up. Build your out-of-hours contractor list with the same rigour you’d apply to any other supplier, ask the awkward questions before you need the answers, and you’ll spend far less time explaining an invoice or an incident after the fact.
Adiuvo (adiuvo.org.uk) provides 24/7 emergency call handling for the property sector, managing over one million homes. Renovo Services (renovoservices.uk), part of the Adiuvo Group, is its dedicated multi-trade contractor network.
