Make the unit the anchor, not the inbox. Every reported fault becomes a request logged against the property with a type, a priority and photos; the contractor is briefed by email so the instruction exists outside a phone call; the tenant is updated automatically on every status change; and the cost is captured as a contractor work item that the agency approves, that rolls into that landlord's disbursement statement, and that is confirmed paid against bank data — with the movement decomposed into client-ledger entries for PSRA. What you're left with is a per-property repair history and a per-client money trail that were produced as a by-product of doing the work, not as a month-end reconstruction. Free 14-day trial, no card required.
There's a moment every growing agency hits. The maintenance process that worked fine at forty units — a shared inbox, a WhatsApp group with the plumber, a spreadsheet of jobs — stops working somewhere around a hundred and fifty. Not dramatically. It degrades: a job that nobody chased, a contractor who turned up at the wrong unit, an invoice that sat for six weeks because nobody knew which landlord it belonged to.
What's actually happened is that the volume finally exceeded the number of things a person can hold in their head, and the process was never anything other than people holding things in their head.
This is a guide, not legal advice
Repair obligations, minimum-standards enforcement and client-money handling are fact-specific. This article explains the general position for Irish private residential lettings and how an agency workflow supports it. Confirm your obligations with the RTB, your local authority and the PSRA.
Why maintenance breaks at portfolio scale
The failure isn't that agencies don't do the repairs. Nearly all of them do. It's that at scale a repair carries three separate obligations simultaneously, and a text thread carries one of them badly and the other two not at all.
| What a repair also is | Where it bites |
|---|---|
| A compliance obligation | Under the Residential Tenancies Act 2004 a landlord must keep the structure and interior of a rented home in the condition they were in at the start of the tenancy — normal wear and tear excepted — and carry out repairs. Separately, the Housing (Standards for Rented Houses) Regulations 2019 set the minimum standards local authorities inspect and enforce. A repair that never got done is a live exposure on a property you manage. |
| A piece of evidence | At deposit return, in an RTB case, or at a council inspection, the question is never did you fix it. It's can you show what was reported, when, and what you did. A repair remembered is not evidence. |
| A movement of client money | The contractor has to be paid, the right landlord has to be charged, the statement has to explain it, and the client-money position has to balance. That's the part that quietly eats a month-end. |
An agency that logs repairs in one place and reconciles contractor costs in another is doing the same job twice — and can still only prove half of it.
Everything below is one idea applied repeatedly: capture the thing once, at the moment it happens, in a structure that all three obligations can read.
One request, one record, anchored to the unit
The single most important field on a maintenance request isn't the description. It's the property. That's what turns four hundred individual jobs into a per-property history you can produce on demand.
| Field | Why it earns its place at scale |
|---|---|
| Property | The request joins that unit's history rather than floating in an inbox. Everything downstream — the landlord it recharges to, the inspection evidence, the deposit case — keys off this. |
| Title & description | Short title for a list of hundreds; description for the detail a contractor actually needs. |
| Type | Electrical, plumbing, HVAC, cooling, security, carpentry or general — for routing to the right trade and for seeing what your book actually breaks. |
| Priority | Low, medium, high or urgent. This is the field that makes a list of four hundred open requests usable instead of paralysing. |
| Photos | Up to three JPG or PNG images. A dated photo at the point of report fixes the date, the location and the condition — the three things every later argument turns on, and the ones you cannot go back for. |
| Comments vs internal notes | Comments are the shared thread the tenant can see. Internal notes are private to landlords and agents — a contractor's quote, a view on whether a cost is the tenant's or the landlord's, a note about a difficult tenancy. Mixing those two in a WhatsApp group is how awkward messages reach the wrong person. |
Creating the request then does the telling for you. It emails the landlord, sends an acknowledgement email to the tenants on the tenancy, and pushes a notification to the mobile app. For an agency that last-mile automation is worth more than it looks: most inbound "any update on the boiler?" traffic is caused by silence, not by delay, and it is paid for in negotiator hours.
Run every repair on one chain, across the whole book
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Briefing the contractor — in writing, every time
The classic portfolio failure is a job passed on by phone. The contractor writes it in a notebook, arrives at the wrong unit or without knowing what the job is, and when somebody later asks when the work was instructed, nobody can say.
Contractors are held as service provider records — company name, address, service type, email and phone — so assigning one is a selection, not a retyping exercise. Assignment then emails them the whole brief:
- The property address
- The request title and description
- The category and the priority
- The current status and the date the request was submitted
- The assigning agent's name, email and phone number
That one email removes most of the back-and-forth, and it creates the second half of your evidence trail. Not just what was reported — who was instructed, and when. If a tenant later argues that nothing was done, "the contractor was assigned the same afternoon, and here's the job that was sent to them" is a very different conversation from "I'm fairly sure somebody rang someone."
| Status | What it means on the floor |
|---|---|
| New | Reported and logged. The clock — legal and reputational — starts here. |
| Scheduled | A time is agreed. This is the status tenants most want to see. |
| Awaiting contractor | Assigned and with the trade — out of your hands, not out of the record. |
| In progress | Work under way. |
| Tenant responded | The ball is back with the tenant — access, availability, more detail needed. |
| Pending | Blocked on a part, a quote or a landlord approval. |
| Completed / Cancelled | Closed out, with the dates that closed it recorded against the property. |
Every status change emails the tenant automatically. Nobody has to remember to keep them posted, which is exactly why it actually happens.
Portfolio-wide visibility — the morning triage
A branch manager opening a list of four hundred open requests has no more information than one opening an empty screen. Visibility at scale isn't a list — it's the ability to reduce the list to the twelve things that matter today.
- Search across request titles and property names, for when a landlord rings about "the one in Rathmines".
- Filters by status and priority — filter to urgent and high and you have your morning.
- Date-range filtering, including a custom start and end date, for a client review or a month-end look-back.
- A statistics panel: total, new, in progress, completed and cancelled, alongside urgent, high, medium and low volumes — the shape of your workload in one glance.
- Excel export of the filtered set, on Pro and Premium plans, for the client report somebody always asks for.
Letting tenants raise their own — and stop ringing you
A tenant with tenant-portal access can raise a request against the property they lease, describe it, attach photos and follow it through the comment thread. Tenants see only their own requests, and can't assign contractors or read internal notes.
The compliance benefit is that reports arrive structured and dated instead of as a text at 11pm. The commercial benefit is bigger and less discussed: a tenant who can see the job moving doesn't ring. Our guide to deflecting inbound queries with the tenant portal goes through the full picture of what self-service takes off the phones.
The repair that never gets logged is always the small one
A dripping tap, a sticking window, an alarm chirping. It gets handled informally and forgotten. Then the tenancy ends, the deposit conversation starts, or the council calls — and the small things turn out to be the ones with no paper trail at all. The habit worth building isn't logging big repairs. It's logging every repair, because logging takes half a minute and reconstructing takes an afternoon.
The money chain: getting the cost to the right client
For an agency, a repair isn't finished when the contractor leaves. It's finished when the cost has been correctly deducted, the landlord can see why, the contractor has been paid, and the client-money position balances. That's a chain most agencies run across three systems and reconcile by hand at month end. Here it is as one flow:
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1. Work recorded | Contractor work is captured against the property as a work item with a description, an amount and a work date, optionally tied to a specific lease and linked to an expense record. |
| 2. Agency approves | The item moves from pending to approved. Nothing reaches a landlord statement without an explicit approval step — which is the control that stops a disputed cost becoming a disputed statement. |
| 3. Into the disbursement | The approved item rolls into that landlord's monthly disbursement statement, showing gross rent collected, the management fee retained, the contractor deduction and the net amount payable — one statement per landlord, per branch, per month. |
| 4. Reviewed and approved | The statement runs draft → pending agency review → pending landlord approval → approved. Where a branch doesn't require landlord approval, agency approval goes straight to approved. Landlords approve through a public link rather than needing a login. |
| 5. Payment confirmed against the bank | When the agency pays, the matcher looks for an outbound debit on the collection account whose amount and recipient IBAN match, and marks the item paid with the confirming transaction recorded. No match within seven days of approval and it's flagged payment overdue — a late payment can still flip it back to paid. |
| 6. Into the client ledger | The movement is classified on the per-client ledger — rent receipt, deposit receipt, disbursement, management fee, contractor payment or adjustment, each with an in or out direction — the shape the Client Moneys Regulations 2012 require for tracing every euro held on a client's behalf. |
Two details matter more than they look. Management fees are configured per branch — as a percentage or a fixed amount, applied to rent only or rent plus recurring extras — with optional per-property overrides, so the client who negotiated a different rate doesn't become a manual adjustment every month. And contractor IBANs are encrypted at rest, with only the last four characters shown, and revealed only on an explicit authorised request.
The step agencies most often skip is number five. Paying a contractor and believing you paid them are different states, and the gap between them is where contractor relationships quietly rot. Full detail on the statement side is in our guide to landlord disbursements and management fees; the client-money and inspection picture is in client-money and per-landlord reporting.
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Response times: what's the software's job, and what's yours
Agencies ask about SLAs constantly, so here's the straight answer: TenantSync doesn't run an SLA clock. There's no automatic breach alert and no built-in response-time target.
What it gives you are the ingredients of one, and they're the parts that are actually hard to build by hand:
- A priority on every request, so "urgent" is a field rather than a tone of voice.
- A status lifecycle with timestamps, so how long a job sat in each state is recoverable rather than argued.
- A filterable list with statistics, so an urgent job can't hide behind four hundred routine ones.
- Export, so the contractor conversation is held against data rather than impressions.
The standard itself — 24 hours to acknowledge, heat and hot water same-day, a defined escalation for a no-show contractor — is your policy, and it belongs in your landlord agreements and your contractor terms. Software can make it visible and measurable. It can't decide what it should be, and any tool that claims to has decided it for you.
Set the priority honestly
Heat, hot water and fire safety are not "medium". The priority field only works as triage if it means something — and the fastest way to make a portfolio's urgent queue useless is to let everything become urgent. Agree internally what qualifies, and hold the line.
Minimum standards across a managed book
Local authorities inspect rented homes against the 2019 minimum-standards regulations and escalate from an improvement letter to a statutory improvement notice to a prohibition notice that stops the property being re-let. For an agency the difficulty isn't the standard — it's that the exposure is distributed. Two hundred units, each with its own certificate dates and its own list of small unfixed things, and no single view of any of it.
A maintenance record does two jobs here. Prospectively, an open urgent request on a property is a live risk you can see before an inspector does. Retrospectively, a property that shows faults reported and closed out — with dates and photos — supports the case that the home has been actively maintained, and it makes the visit shorter.
The other half is certificates, which expire silently: BER, gas safety, electrical, alarm servicing. Those belong in compliance tracking with due dates and reminders rather than in a folder, and they're the first thing an inspector asks for.
The portfolio maintenance workflow
Whether you run it in TenantSync or on paper, this is the standing playbook that turns a reported fault into a defensible record and a correctly recharged cost:
The standing workflow
- Log it against the unit the moment it's reported — never in a text thread or a notebook.
- Photograph it before anything is touched. Three photos, dated, at the point of report.
- Set a real priority and a real type. Both are triage fields, not decoration.
- Let the acknowledgement go automatically. Most chasing is caused by silence, not delay.
- Assign the contractor in writing — address, description, category, priority, your contact details.
- Keep the two threads separate: comments for the tenant, internal notes for your team.
- Move the status as reality moves. A stale status is worse than none, because the tenant is being emailed it.
- Close it out properly, with the date, so the response time is recoverable.
- Record the cost as a work item against the property, with the amount and work date.
- Approve it deliberately — that's the control point before it reaches a client.
- Check the statement: rent collected, fee retained, contractor deduction, net paid.
- Confirm the contractor was paid, and chase anything flagged payment overdue.
General guidance only. Confirm repair and minimum-standards obligations at rtb.ie and with your local authority.
How to get started
- Start your free 14-day trial — no credit card required — or book a demo to see the chain end to end on a real portfolio.
- Import your properties and tenancies, with concierge help if you're moving off Letman or spreadsheets.
- Add your contractors as service providers, with an email address so assignment briefs actually reach them.
- Set your management fee per branch, with per-property overrides for the clients on a different rate.
- Switch tenants onto the portal so requests arrive structured instead of by text.
- Run the next repair on the chain — logged, assigned, tracked, costed, approved, deducted, confirmed paid.
None of this makes a boiler get fixed faster. What it does is make sure the job was recorded, the contractor was told, the tenant was updated, the right landlord was charged, and you can prove all four — which at two hundred units is the whole difference between an agency that scales and one that just gets busier.
Frequently asked questions
Why does maintenance break down at portfolio scale?
Because at scale a repair is three obligations at once and most agencies track one. It's a compliance obligation — the Residential Tenancies Act 2004 duty to keep the structure and interior in the condition they were in at the start of the tenancy, plus the Housing (Standards for Rented Houses) Regulations 2019 that local authorities inspect and enforce. It's evidence, for a deposit deduction, an RTB case or an inspection. And it's a movement of client money that has to reach the right landlord's statement. A WhatsApp thread carries the first badly and the other two not at all.
How does TenantSync CRM handle a maintenance request?
A request is logged against a specific property with a title, description, type (electrical, plumbing, HVAC, cooling, security, carpentry or general), a priority from low to urgent, and up to three JPG or PNG photos. Creating it emails the landlord, sends an acknowledgement to the tenants on the tenancy and pushes a mobile notification. You assign a service provider, who is emailed the full job. As the status changes — new, scheduled, awaiting contractor, in progress, tenant responded, pending, completed, cancelled — the tenant is emailed automatically. Comments are the shared tenant-visible thread; internal notes are private to landlords and agents.
What does a contractor receive when a job is assigned?
An email with the property address, the request title and description, the category, the priority, the current status, the date the request was submitted, and the assigning agent's name, email and phone number. That removes most of the back-and-forth and creates the second half of the evidence trail — not just what was reported, but who was instructed and when. Contractors are held as service provider records with a company name, address, service type, email and phone, so assignment is a selection rather than a retyping exercise.
How do I see everything open across the whole portfolio?
The maintenance list covers every request across the properties the account manages, with free-text search over request titles and property names, filters by status and priority, a date-range filter including a custom range, and sorting. A statistics panel shows total, new, in-progress, completed and cancelled counts alongside urgent, high, medium and low volumes — so you open the morning on the urgent queue rather than on a list of four hundred. The filtered set exports to Excel on Pro and Premium plans.
Can tenants raise their own requests?
Yes. A tenant with tenant-portal access can raise a request against the property they lease, describe it, attach photos and follow the comment thread. Reports arrive structured and dated instead of as a text at 11pm, and the tenant can see the job moving — which is what most follow-up calls are really about. Tenants see only their own requests, and can't assign contractors or read internal notes.
How does a contractor cost reach the right landlord?
Contractor work is recorded against the property as a work item with an amount and a work date, optionally linked to an expense. The agency approves it — nothing reaches a landlord statement without an explicit approval step. It then rolls into that landlord's monthly disbursement statement showing gross rent collected, the management fee retained, the contractor deduction and the net amount payable, routed through agency review and, where the branch requires it, landlord approval before payment. Management fees are configured per branch as a percentage or fixed amount, applied to rent only or rent plus recurring extras, with optional per-property overrides.
How do I know the contractor was actually paid?
It's confirmed against bank data rather than memory. When the agency pays, the matcher looks for an outbound debit on the agency collection account whose amount and recipient IBAN match the work item, and marks it paid with the confirming transaction recorded against it. If no match is found within seven days of approval, the item is flagged payment overdue — and a late payment can still flip it back to paid. The same confirmation runs on landlord disbursement statements.
Does TenantSync enforce contractor SLAs?
No, and it's worth being straight about it — there's no SLA clock or automatic breach alert. What you get are the ingredients: a priority on every request from low to urgent, a status lifecycle with timestamps so time-in-state is recoverable, and a filterable list with statistics so an urgent job can't hide behind four hundred routine ones. The response-time standard is the agency's policy to set and manage, and the reporting to hold contractors to it comes from exported data rather than a built-in SLA engine.
How does maintenance relate to a minimum-standards inspection?
Directly. Local authorities inspect against the Housing (Standards for Rented Houses) Regulations 2019 and can escalate from an improvement letter to an improvement notice to a prohibition notice barring re-letting. A record that shows faults reported and closed out, with dates and photos, turns "we maintain the property" into something an inspector can read — and an open urgent request is a live risk you can see before they do. Across a managed book the exposure is distributed, which is exactly why it has to be a property attribute rather than a negotiator's memory.
Where does maintenance touch PSRA client money?
Wherever a contractor is paid out of client money. Movements on the per-client ledger are classified by type — rent receipt, deposit receipt, disbursement, management fee, contractor payment, adjustment — each with an in or out direction, which is the shape the Client Moneys Regulations 2012 require for tracing every euro held on a client's behalf. Our client-money and per-landlord reporting guide covers the reconciliation and inspection side in full.
Sources
- S.I. No. 137/2019 — Housing (Standards for Rented Houses) Regulations 2019, Irish Statute Book
- Minimum standards for rental properties, Residential Tenancies Board
- Minimum standards in rented accommodation, Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage
- Property Services Regulatory Authority — client money and licensing obligations
General guidance. Confirm your own obligations with the RTB, your local authority and the PSRA.