Code 68201: operating a property is a different activity from cleaning one

0 · The code, in plain words

The third code on the board is 68201, the renting and operating of Housing Association real estate. It is on the register because operating property is an activity this company is set up to carry on, and it is written about here separately because the same company also cleans property for other people — and the two must never be read as one offer.

Everything below describes how a property is handled where the company itself holds it. None of it is advice to anybody else, and none of it applies to a block or a flat that this company merely attends to clean.

1 · Where a property is held, what the file carries

A property file is opened at the point the company takes the property on, and it carries the address, the extent of what is held, the services and their meter numbers, the keys and how many of each exist, and the schedule of condition taken before anybody moves in. Correspondence about the property is filed to it in date order rather than by subject, because a file ordered by subject is a file in which the awkward item is always in the other section.

The file is kept at 50C Ealing Road with the rest of the company's records. What is kept, and for how long, is set out under what is held; it is the same answer for a property file as for a works order, because there is no reason for it to be a different answer.

2 · The two ends of a tenancy

At the start

Schedule of condition, room by room, with the state of each floor finish recorded because a floor is the thing that is argued about at the far end. Meters read and the readings noted. Keys issued against a signed receipt that names how many were handed over.

During

Reported faults go on the file with the date reported and the date attended. A repair that is carried out is written down whether or not it cost anything, because the absence of an entry is later read as the absence of a repair.

At the end

Keys back against the same receipt, meters read again, and the condition compared with the schedule taken at the start rather than with an impression of how it looked.

Then the clean

The void clean is raised as a works order against the property file, so that the cost and the sign-off sit with the property and not with some third party's contract.

3 · The separation, and why it is worth the trouble

Cleaning a flat for a landlord and cleaning a flat the company itself holds look identical on the floor and must not look identical on paper. A cleaning works order carries the client, the premises type and the operation; a property works order carries the property file reference instead. Consumables are logged to whichever of the two used them, on the day, and the van's time is split the same way.

This matters most in the one place the two activities touch: a void turnaround is the same work either way. Where it is done for somebody else it is a cleaning job with a client. Where it is done for this company's own property it is maintenance of an asset, and dressing it up as trade is how a set of records becomes misleading without anybody having told a lie.