The Midlands landlord's autumn checklist: what to sort before the clocks change

There's a pattern to our winter. From late November the phone starts ringing with the same handful of jobs: a boiler that's died on the first cold morning, a ceiling stained from a blocked gutter, black mould in a bedroom corner that wasn't there in August, and a burst pipe in an empty property nobody had checked. Almost all of them were visible in September, and almost all of them would have been a fraction of the cost then. This is the walk-round we'd do now on a rental portfolio anywhere across Birmingham, Solihull, Coventry and the wider Midlands — written for landlords, letting agents and anyone managing an HMO.

Start with the paperwork — it dates faster than you think

None of this is glamorous, but it's the part that turns into a problem at exactly the wrong moment. Before the heating season starts, pull your files and check the dates on each property. As general guidance for England, the main ones are:

• Gas safety record. An annual check of gas appliances and flues by a Gas Safe registered engineer, with the record given to existing tenants within 28 days and to any new tenant at the start of the tenancy. If yours expires in December or January, get it moved forward now — engineers are flat out once the cold hits.
• EICR. Electrical installations in private rented homes in England must be inspected and tested at least every five years, with a copy of the report to tenants. Five years goes quickly; check the issue date, not the date you remember booking it.
• Smoke and carbon monoxide alarms. A smoke alarm on every storey used as living accommodation, and a CO alarm in any room used as living accommodation containing a fixed combustion appliance — a gas boiler or a solid fuel stove, for example (gas cookers are excluded). They have to be working at the start of a tenancy, and repaired or replaced when a tenant reports a fault.
• EPC. Worth a look at where each property sits now rather than the week a new tenancy starts, particularly if you're weighing up insulation or heating work anyway.
• HMO licence. Check the expiry and the conditions attached to it — and whether the property has drifted into licensable territory since you last looked. Our HMO licensing guide for Birmingham covers where the thresholds sit.

Then go outside, and look up

Water getting into a building from above is the single most expensive thing that happens to a rental over winter, and it almost always announces itself first outside. Ten minutes with your feet on the ground and your head tilted back will find most of it.

• Gutters and downpipes. Plant growth in a gutter, staining down the brickwork, or a downpipe that drips at a joint. A blocked gutter in October is a soaked wall and an internal damp patch by February — our autumn gutter guide has the detail.
• Slipped or missing tiles, and ridge mortar that's cracked or lifting. Look from the pavement and from the back garden; the two views hide different things.
• Flat roofs over extensions, dormers and bays. Ponding water, splits, and bubbling felt. These fail quietly and get found by the tenant's ceiling.
• The ground. Soil or a raised patio bridging the damp-proof course, blocked air bricks, and gullies full of leaves.
• Sealant and pointing round window frames, and any external render that's cracked or hollow-sounding.

If any of that needs doing, do it before the weather closes in. Roof and gutter work is slower, more expensive and sometimes simply impossible in January, and a roofing repair booked in September is a planned job rather than an emergency.

Heating: test it now, not on the first cold night

The most avoidable winter emergency there is. A system that's been sitting idle since March will happily look fine until it's asked to do something. Turn it on for an hour with the tenant's agreement and actually watch what happens.

• Does every radiator get hot all the way up? Cold at the top means air and a bleed sorts it; cold at the bottom usually means sludge, which is a power flush conversation, not a bleed.
• What's the boiler pressure doing cold, and what's it doing hot? A system that needs topping up every few weeks has a leak or a failed expansion vessel — see why a boiler keeps losing pressure.
• Does the thermostat actually call for heat, and does the tenant know how to use the programmer? A surprising number of 'broken heating' call-outs are a timer nobody has been shown.
• Any thermostatic radiator valves seized open or shut? Cheap part, common fault, and a seized-shut valve in a bedroom is a mould problem waiting to happen.
• Is there a clear route to a service and any notifiable work that's fallen due, so your registered engineer isn't doing it in December?

Damp and mould: get ahead of it in September

Condensation problems are seasonal, predictable and largely preventable, and they're also the complaints that escalate fastest. The conditions that cause black mould in a Midlands bedroom arrive with the cold, so September and October are when you fix the causes rather than wiping the symptoms.

• Check extractor fans in kitchens and bathrooms actually extract. Hold a sheet of paper to the grille — if it doesn't hold, the fan is decorative. Clogged grilles and disconnected ducting in the loft are both common.
• Make sure trickle vents are present, clear and not painted shut, and that air bricks aren't blocked.
• Look behind furniture on external walls, in wardrobes, and in the corners above windows — the cold spots where it always starts.
• Check for the tell-tales of a real defect rather than condensation: a tide mark low down on a wall, damp that's worse after rain, or a single localised patch. Our guides on rising damp and damp on a chimney breast help you tell them apart.
• Talk to the tenant about heating and ventilation without making it sound like blame. A property that's expensive to heat gets under-heated, and under-heated property grows mould — which loops back to insulation, draughts and the heating system, all of which are yours.

Water: the one that empties a property

A burst pipe does more damage in a night than most things do in a year, and it's far worse in a property nobody is living in. Two jobs are worth doing on every property you hold.

• Find the stopcock, check it actually turns, and tell the tenant where it is. A seized stopcock is a £55 job today and a catastrophe at 2am — our guide on finding and turning off the water is worth forwarding to tenants.
• Lag any pipework in lofts, garages and unheated outbuildings, and check the loft hatch and cold water tank insulation while you're up there.
• Insulate or isolate outside taps before the first hard frost.
• In a void or a holiday-empty property: leave the heating on a low frost setting rather than off, or drain the system down properly. Off and full of water is the worst of both.
• Check overflow pipes and any sign of a dripping outlet — a running overflow in October is usually a failed float valve and a cheap fix.

HMOs need a bit more

Shared houses carry extra duties and take more wear, and winter is when the fire and safety side gets tested. Alongside everything above, walk the escape route as though you were leaving in the dark: is it clear, is the emergency lighting working, do the fire doors close fully onto their frames and are the intumescent strips intact? Check the fire alarm test record is actually being kept, that no one has wedged a fire door open, and that the communal areas, bin store and garden are in the condition your licence conditions expect. Heating and hot water failures also hit harder in an HMO, because one boiler outage affects five households instead of one.

If the property is between tenants, autumn is also the sensible window for anything disruptive — our void turnaround and refurbishment teams would far rather do a kitchen or a full redecoration in October than try to fit it around a tenancy in the new year.

A realistic order to do it in

• Week one: pull the certificates and diarise anything expiring before March.
• Week two: external walk-round on every property — roof, gutters, ground level, seals. Book what needs booking.
• Week three: heating test and fan test in each property, with a short list of small fixes per address.
• Week four: stopcocks, lagging, outside taps and anything sitting empty.
• Then batch the small jobs. Twelve niggles across four properties done in two planned visits costs far less than twelve separate call-outs, and nothing on that list is urgent yet — which is exactly the point.

That last one is where most landlords save real money. Send us a list and a few photos and we'll tell you honestly what's urgent, what can wait until spring and what isn't worth doing at all. Day-to-day work is general repairs at £55 an hour with materials at cost, we run 24/7 emergency cover for the nights it does go wrong, and we work with letting agents and registered providers across the Midlands on exactly this kind of planned maintenance. Book an autumn check or get in touch and we'll get it in the diary before the weather does it for you.