Why a contractor register needs more than a phone number

Most letting agents and managing agents have a list of contractors they use — a name, a phone number, maybe a note about what they're good for. Far fewer have a genuine register: a record of accreditation, insurance expiry, and performance that's actually kept current rather than assembled once and never revisited.

What was checked once can quietly lapse

As covered in what to check before instructing a contractor, registration and insurance are worth verifying before the first job. The part that's easy to miss is that both can lapse later — an insurance renewal missed, an accreditation not renewed on time — without the agent who originally vetted the contractor ever finding out, because nobody's watching for it after the initial check.

What a proper register actually tracks

Beyond contact details, a useful register holds accreditation type and expiry, insurance level and expiry, typical response time, and which trades and property types they're actually suited to — not every contractor who's good with a routine repair is the right choice for an emergency out-of-hours call, and that distinction matters when speed genuinely counts.

• –Accreditation type and expiry date, checked periodically rather than only at onboarding
• –Insurance level and expiry, tracked the same way certificate expiry is tracked elsewhere
• –Typical response time, especially for anything that might need an emergency call-out
• –Which trades and property types a contractor is actually well suited to, not just willing to take on
• –A record of past performance — jobs completed on time, work that needed revisiting, communication quality

Why this matters more once findings feed directly into repairs

Once inspection findings and certificate observations are routed straight into a repair workflow, the contractor register becomes a live dependency rather than a background reference — routing a job to a contractor whose insurance quietly lapsed last month isn't just an administrative gap, it's a genuine exposure if something goes wrong on that job.

Performance tracking, not just compliance tracking

It's worth recording more than just whether a contractor is currently compliant — a simple, honest note after each job on whether it was completed on time, whether the work needed revisiting, and how clearly the contractor communicated builds a genuinely useful picture over time, one that's far more reliable than relying on memory or general reputation when deciding who to call next.