Property Management

Managing a building on behalf of tenants means looking after everything nobody individually owns: the entrance, the stairwell, the lift, the bin store, the garden and the shared electricity bill that pays for all of it.

This category covers access control across many tenants, lighting communal areas without lighting them all night, monitoring plant and lifts before a failure becomes an emergency, and reporting shared consumption in a way residents will accept.

Articles in this category

1. Entrance access for a building with forty tenants

   The most used and least managed equipment in any block. Replacing keys is the highest-value change available to a managing agent, and the difficulty is administrative rather than technical.

   6 min read · 1,354 words · Reviewed November 2026

2. Lighting communal areas without lighting them all night

   Switching communal lights off is the obvious approach and the wrong one. Dimming to a background level and brightening on approach saves nearly as much and generates no complaints.

   6 min read · 1,441 words · Reviewed November 2026

3. Lifts, pumps and plant: catching failures before the emergency call

   Plant rarely fails instantly. Most equipment degrades measurably for weeks first, which means the difference between an emergency and a planned repair is usually whether anyone was watching.

   6 min read · 1,313 words · Reviewed July 2026

4. Water leaks in a stacked building: the risk that travels downwards

   One leak damages several homes, several policies and several residents who did not cause it. It is the best prevention-to-damage ratio in this category and chronically under-addressed.

   6 min read · 1,372 words · Reviewed November 2026

5. Shared energy and water: metering, billing and resident trust

   Monitoring shared consumption is straightforward. Billing individuals from it is regulated. Confusing the two is how metering projects generate opposition.

   6 min read · 1,386 words · Reviewed November 2026

6. Tenant turnover, records and who owns the administrator account

   The unglamorous administration that decides whether any of this still works in five years. It costs least and is skipped most.

   6 min read · 1,341 words · Reviewed September 2026