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Cost of property maintenance in rental sector almost £30 billion each year
This article is an external press release originally published on the Landlord News website, which has now been migrated to the Just Landlords blog.
Maintenance in the rental sector in the UK has reached a total of £30 billion a year, according to research from Help me Fix, the property maintenance solution provider.
It says the general rule of thumb is that the cost of maintaining a property each year sits at roughly 1% of the property’s value. With the current average house price hitting £278,436, this means annual maintenance costs total £2,784 per property for private and social landlords and management companies.
If applied to total rental stock, the current annual maintenance cost for the UK rental market is £29.7 billion a year: £15.6 billion for private stock and £14.1 billion for social stock.
On a regional level, London is home to the biggest rental market and, as a result, has the largest annual rental maintenance bill at £9.7 billion.
In the South East, annual rental market maintenance costs total £4.8 billion, with the East of England (£3.1 billion), the South West (£2.7 billion) and the North West (£2.4 billion) also home to some of the largest annual maintenance bills in the UK rental market.
Ettan Bazil, founder of Help me Fix, comments: “Ongoing maintenance can be a sizeable outgoing when it comes to managing a rental property, but it’s also a necessity and ensures that the accommodation provided to private and social residents is fit for purpose and above board.
“Not only is the monetary total enormous, but the time and effort that is being spent completing these works is also a full-time commitment, particularly for management companies who are responsible for a large number of rental homes.
“For social housing in particular, this is time and resource that could otherwise be put to better use, so it’s lucky that we live in an age where technology is disrupting old-fashioned maintenance methods.
“By allowing landlords and property managers the ability to consult, assess and advise residents on their maintenance issues via a trained professional, but in a digital capacity first, we’ve been able to dramatically reduce unnecessary expenditure and labour hours, halving annual maintenance costs in the process.
“Applied to the social sector alone, that’s a saving of £7bn per year should this approach be adopted on a sector wide basis, raising resident living standards in the process, not sacrificing them.”
