Cold, damp and an empty flat: what winter does to a portfolio

Three things happen to rented property between November and January, and they arrive together. Condensation season starts in earnest, pipework in empty and under-heated properties becomes vulnerable, and the people a tenant would normally ring are off for a fortnight. Each is manageable. The combination is what produces the complaints that end up somewhere formal.

The general seasonal work is in the seasonal property maintenance checklist. This is about the specific risks of the coldest weeks and the holiday gap in the middle of them.

Condensation season is a reporting problem before it is a repair

Mould appears in volume from about now. The instinct of the trade for thirty years has been to attribute it to how a household lives — drying washing indoors, not opening windows, not heating the property — and that instinct is now the single most dangerous response available, because attributing without assessing is exactly what investigations look for.

What determines how a damp case goes is almost always the first report. A record made on the first visit, with photographs, readings and a cause actually assessed, demonstrates a landlord who responded. A note saying 'mould in bathroom, advised to ventilate' demonstrates the opposite, and it will be read back later. The damp and mould report exists for exactly this, and what landlords must now do covers how the obligations have moved.

Record who is in the household, too. Vulnerability changes both the urgency and the obligation, and a report that does not say a baby lives in the affected room cannot show the response was proportionate to the risk.

Void and under-heated properties

An empty property between tenancies is the classic winter loss. The heating is off because nobody is paying for it, the water is on because nobody drained it, and the first hard frost does the rest — often with nobody opening the door for a week after it happens.

• –Decide, per void, whether the system is drained down or the heating left on a frost setting — and record which
• –Check that a 'frost setting' is actually set rather than assumed from a thermostat somebody glanced at
• –Know when each void was last physically attended, because that is the ceiling on how long damage can have been running
• –Watch tenanted properties where heating costs mean the heating is not being used — the physics is the same
• –Keep a working out-of-hours number that somebody actually answers over the break

The last one is the gap that turns a repair into a complaint. A tenant with no heating on 28 December who cannot reach anybody is not primarily annoyed about the boiler — they are annoyed about the silence, and the silence is what gets described afterwards.

Access, no access, and the certificate that lapses

Winter is also when access gets harder. Tenants are away, engineers cancel in bad weather, and an appointment missed in the week before Christmas does not get rebooked until mid-January. A gas safety record or an EICR expiring in that window is the one most likely to lapse.

What protects a landlord here is evidence of attempts: dates, methods and what was said each time. A landlord who has tried repeatedly and recorded trying is in a completely different position from one who has simply not got in, and the record has to exist before anybody asks for it. The certificate expiry tracker has a column for exactly this, and it is worth pulling the January and February expiries forward rather than meeting them in the dark.

Inspections see more in winter

There is one upside. A property inspection carried out in cold, wet weather shows you things a summer visit cannot: where condensation actually forms, whether extract ventilation works, whether the heating is adequate and being used, and whether any of the external fabric is letting water in. The building is being tested, and an inspection during the test is worth two outside it.

Record what you find factually and split the findings — landlord repairs and tenant matters go to different people on different timescales. Photograph any mould, however minor, because an inspection that notes it in passing is the record that will later be produced as evidence the landlord knew.