Written by
Sarah Nguyen
Published on
Jan 28, 2026
Ask any letting agent where their time goes and maintenance will come up within seconds. But ask them to put a number on it — actual hours, actual cost — and most can't.
That's a problem. Because if you don't know what maintenance admin is costing you, you can't make informed decisions about fixing it. And you're probably underestimating the impact.
Maintenance admin: the invisible time sink
Here's the thing about maintenance: the repairs themselves aren't what drain your team's time. It's everything around them.
A plumber fixing a leaky tap takes 30 minutes. But getting to that point? That's where the hours disappear:
Taking the initial call or email
Asking follow-up questions because the tenant said "the tap's broken" with no other details
Deciding if it's urgent or can wait
Finding an available plumber
Getting the tenant's availability
Coordinating access
Chasing the plumber for an update
Updating the landlord
Documenting everything
Each step is small. But multiply it across every maintenance issue, across every property, across every month — and you're looking at a significant chunk of your operating costs.
Most agencies don't track this. So they don't realise that maintenance coordination typically accounts for 30-40% of a property manager's working hours.
Breaking down the tasks
Here's what a typical maintenance issue looks like in terms of time:
Task | Time per issue |
|---|---|
Taking the initial report (call/email/message) | 5-10 mins |
Follow-up questions to understand the problem | 10-15 mins |
Triaging and classifying urgency | 5 mins |
Finding and instructing a contractor | 15-30 mins |
Coordinating tenant access | 10-20 mins |
Chasing contractor for updates | 10 mins |
Updating the landlord | 10-15 mins |
Documenting and closing the job | 5-10 mins |
Total: 70-115 minutes per issue.
That's for a straightforward job. Complex issues — disputes about responsibility, multiple contractor visits, landlord approval delays — can easily double or triple this.
Calculating your true cost
Let's run the numbers for a typical agency:
100 managed properties × 3 maintenance issues per month = 300 issues
At 45 minutes average per issue (being conservative), that's 225 hours per month on maintenance admin alone.
If your fully-loaded cost per hour is £20 (salary, NI, pension, office costs), you're spending £4,500 per month — or £54,000 per year — just coordinating repairs.
For larger portfolios, scale accordingly. At 200 properties, you're looking at £100k+ annually.
And that's just the direct cost. What about the opportunity cost? Those 225 hours could be spent on:
Winning new landlords
Improving tenant retention
Building contractor relationships
Actually growing the business
Instead, your team is playing telephone between tenants and plumbers.
Where the waste happens
Not all maintenance admin is created equal. Some of it is genuinely necessary. But a lot of it is pure waste — time spent because of poor processes, not because the work requires it.
Incomplete information at first contact. Tenant says "boiler's not working." Your team spends 15 minutes on the phone extracting: What exactly is happening? Any error codes? Have you checked the pressure? When did it start? Is there hot water? Heating?
With the right questions asked upfront — conversationally, through WhatsApp or email — this back-and-forth disappears.
Phone ping-pong. Tenant calls you. You call the contractor. Contractor calls back with a question. You call the tenant. Tenant doesn't answer. You leave a message. Tenant calls back two hours later...
Every handoff creates delay and duplicated effort.
Manual documentation. Copying information from emails into your CRM. Updating spreadsheets. Writing the same status update to the landlord that you just wrote to the tenant. Logging the job as complete across three different systems.
No triage framework. Without clear criteria for what's an emergency vs what can wait, every issue gets treated with the same urgency. Or worse, urgent issues get missed while your team deals with dripping taps.
Reactive firefighting. When you're constantly responding to whatever lands in your inbox, you never get ahead. Preventable issues become emergencies. Small problems become big ones. And your team stays permanently in crisis mode.
How to cut maintenance admin by 50% or more
The agencies that have solved this problem share a few common approaches:
Capture complete information upfront
The biggest time-saver is getting the right information the first time. When a tenant reports an issue, you need:
What's actually happening (not just "it's broken")
Photos or videos where relevant
Any error codes or warning lights
What they've already tried
Their availability for a contractor visit
Rigid forms don't work well here — tenants abandon them or fill them in badly. Conversational AI does this naturally, asking follow-up questions based on what the tenant says, just like your team would — but available 24/7 and without taking anyone's time.
A tenant messages "no hot water" at 9pm. By 9:05pm, you have: confirmation the boiler display shows an E119 error, the pressure reads 0.5 bar, and the tenant is available Tuesday afternoon. No phone call required. No staff time spent.
Automate the coordination
Once you know what's wrong and how urgent it is, the next steps are often predictable:
Low pressure, no error code → send boiler pressure guidance, check if resolved
Error code present, no hot water → dispatch heating engineer within 24 hours
Electrical trips after using appliance → guide tenant through reset, escalate if persists
This logic can be automated. The right issue goes to the right contractor with the right information, without your team making decisions or sending emails.
Guide tenants to self-resolve where appropriate
Many "maintenance issues" aren't really maintenance issues. They're tenants who don't know how to repressurise a boiler or reset a trip switch.
If you can guide them through the fix conversationally — walking them through step by step, asking if each step worked — you save a contractor callout and an hour of your team's time.
This isn't about fobbing tenants off. It's about solving their problem faster. A tenant with no hot water would rather fix it in 10 minutes than wait 48 hours for an engineer.
Centralise communication
Every maintenance issue should have one thread where everything lives: tenant messages, contractor updates, photos, landlord approvals, completion confirmation.
No more forwarding emails. No more "let me check with the tenant and get back to you." No more piecing together what happened from five different inboxes.
Use decision frameworks
Consistent triage criteria mean faster decisions and fewer mistakes. When everyone knows that complete loss of heating in winter is a 24-hour emergency but a dripping tap is a 14-day routine job, you don't waste time debating priority.
Document these frameworks once. Apply them to every issue. Better yet, let AI apply them automatically based on what the tenant reports.
Building the business case
If you're trying to justify investment in maintenance automation, here's how to make the case:
Step 1: Track current time spent. For 2-4 weeks, have your team log time spent on maintenance-related tasks. Be specific: intake, triage, contractor coordination, tenant communication, landlord updates, documentation.
Step 2: Calculate fully-loaded cost. Multiply hours by your true cost per hour (don't forget NI, pension, office overhead). This is your baseline.
Step 3: Estimate reduction. Conservative estimate: 40-50% reduction in maintenance admin time with proper automation. Ambitious but achievable: 60-70%.
Step 4: Factor in indirect benefits.
Faster response times → better Awaab's Law compliance
Better documentation → reduced dispute risk
Happier tenants → lower turnover
Happier staff → lower recruitment costs
Freed capacity → ability to grow without hiring
Step 5: Compare to solution cost. Most maintenance automation tools cost a fraction of the time savings they deliver. The ROI is usually measured in weeks, not years.
The bottom line
Maintenance admin is probably costing you more than you think. It's also the area of property management with the highest potential for improvement.
The technology exists to cut this workload by half or more. The agencies that adopt it can manage larger portfolios, deliver better service, and free their teams to focus on work that actually requires human judgment.
The agencies that don't will keep burning hours on phone calls, emails, and spreadsheets — and wondering why they can't scale.
Lanten cuts maintenance admin time by automating the entire workflow. Tenants report issues via WhatsApp or email. AI gathers complete information, provides troubleshooting guidance, and coordinates contractors — with full documentation generated automatically.
