After more than 20 years running a letting and property management agency, I like to think I've spent a reasonable amount of time considering what makes a good contractor. We have always worked with a deliberately small portfolio of trusted people, and the criteria are pretty straightforward: they need to be excellent at what they do, offer genuine value, attend quickly, turn up when they say they will and leave somebody's home as they found it. We also don't take commissions or kickbacks from contractors, despite that being a relatively common practice within parts of our industry, because I want the decision about who we send to a property to be based on what's best for the owner and resident.
Then I sat down with Anna and Paul Moynihan from TaskHer for Viking Chats and realised there was a fairly fundamental question I had never really considered. We spend an enormous amount of time deciding which contractor should attend, but how often do we ask the person whose front door they're about to walk through whether they have a preference about who that person is?
TaskHer connects customers with skilled tradeswomen, and one of the most interesting parts of our conversation concerned their work with Refuge and other women's refuges. There are very specific reasons why having a male contractor entering those environments can create additional safeguarding considerations, including circumstances where residents may need to remain in their rooms or a contractor needs to be accompanied. Being able to provide appropriately checked tradeswomen can therefore transform something as mundane as carrying out maintenance into a much easier experience for the organisation and, more importantly, the women living there.
Those are obviously very particular circumstances, but the conversation made me think much more broadly about every other home we manage. We don't know everything that has happened in our residents' lives, nor should we expect to. Yet we're regularly arranging for people they've never met to walk into what should be the safest and most private place in their world.
A maintenance appointment looks very different from inside the home
Property management has an unfortunate tendency to turn human experiences into operational tasks. A resident reports an issue, we create a job, contact a contractor, obtain approval where necessary, arrange access, get the work completed and close the maintenance ticket. From the perspective of a well-run agency, that's simply the machinery required to keep hundreds or thousands of individual issues moving.
From the resident's perspective, however, the experience can be completely different. Somebody they don't know is coming into their home, potentially while they're there alone, and depending on the work involved that person might be there for hours. They could be entering bedrooms, bathrooms or other deeply personal spaces. Paul described having a stranger in your home as a “discombobulating experience”, and I think that's a remarkably good description of something property professionals can become almost completely desensitised to because we arrange it every day.
We've never had a Base resident specifically tell us that an individual contractor has made them feel unsafe, which I'm pleased about. We have, however, had residents who have experienced problems elsewhere in the past and consequently insist that they must be present whenever any contractor attends their home. That is entirely reasonable, and we've always respected it, but the TaskHer conversation made me wonder about all the people who feel uncomfortable and simply never tell us.
I suspect women in particular have become accustomed to making small compromises around personal safety that many men rarely have to consider. Perhaps somebody rearranges their day so they can be home rather than allowing keys to be released. Maybe they ask a friend or partner to be there. Perhaps they're slightly uncomfortable while the contractor is present but regard that feeling as an unavoidable part of getting the repair completed. Nothing happens, the contractor does a perfectly good job and from our perspective the maintenance process has been a success, yet the resident's experience might still have been considerably better if we'd offered them another option.
Good service shouldn't always wait for somebody to ask
That is probably the biggest thing I've taken away from my conversation with Anna and Paul. Why should somebody have to disclose a bad experience, personal trauma or simply a strong preference before we consider accommodating it? I'd rather build the choice into the service and allow somebody to use it without ever having to explain themselves.
TaskHer has continued developing its proposition since we recorded the podcast and has now expanded into smaller maintenance and handywoman jobs, which makes the potential crossover with our work at Base considerably broader. It's something we're still exploring rather than a service we've implemented, but I would genuinely love to reach the point where a female resident reporting maintenance could indicate whether she'd prefer a female contractor, a male contractor or simply doesn't mind. Ideally, that choice should exist whether the resident intends to be present for the appointment or we're arranging access while they're away.
There is a danger, of course, of replacing one assumption with another. Being a woman doesn't automatically mean somebody wants a female contractor, any more than being a man automatically means somebody wants a male one. TaskHer itself sees demand from men and members of the LGBTQ+ community as well as women, and Anna was very clear during our conversation that the important thing is the ability to offer people choice.
Practicality also matters. If your boiler fails on a freezing January evening and the only engineer available urgently is male, you may care far more about getting your heating working than waiting for somebody who matches a preference you've previously expressed. Somebody else may feel differently, and that's precisely the point. Excellent service isn't about deciding what people ought to value; it's about understanding that people value different things and, where reasonably possible, giving them enough information and choice to decide for themselves.
We shouldn't need to know why it matters
This is where I think empathy in property management is sometimes misunderstood. Being empathetic doesn't mean we need to know somebody's story or make assumptions about what they might have experienced. In fact, demanding an explanation before respecting a preference rather undermines the point.
There are countless experiences somebody might carry into a rental home that their landlord or managing agent knows nothing about. Some will be serious, others relatively mundane, and most are quite rightly none of our business. What matters is recognising that our lack of knowledge doesn't mean those experiences don't exist.
The most powerful thing about offering choice upfront is that it removes the need for disclosure. A resident doesn't have to call a property manager and explain why being alone with a male contractor would make them uncomfortable. They can simply indicate a preference. Somebody else can tick “no preference”, get on with their day and wonder why anyone would make a fuss about it. Both experiences are equally valid.
For me, the objective isn't to create another elaborate procedure around maintenance. Quite the opposite. It is to find a simple way of showing residents that we've considered something which might matter enormously to them, even if it doesn't matter at all to the person living next door.
The contractor is part of your service whether you employ them or not
The conversation also reinforced something we've believed at Base for a very long time: the contractor an agent appoints becomes part of that agent's customer experience. It doesn't particularly matter that they're technically an independent electrician, plumber or decorator. If we selected them, arranged the appointment and sent them into the property, the resident quite reasonably associates their behaviour with us.
That is why we keep our contractor network deliberately small and why price has never been the only consideration. Quality of work obviously matters, but so do reliability, punctuality, communication, speed of attendance and whether somebody respects the fact that they're working inside another person's home. A technically brilliant contractor who repeatedly fails to turn up when promised or leaves a resident cleaning up after them isn't delivering the standard of service we want attached to Base.
We also think these relationships should work both ways. Rather than constantly shopping around for whoever will do a job a few pounds cheaper, we try to be loyal to contractors who consistently deliver for us. We also offer some of the best payment terms you'll find in UK agency, because expecting a small business or sole trader to provide an excellent service while making them wait forever to be paid seems both unfair and commercially stupid.
In return, we get loyalty back. Our contractors frequently go above and beyond for us, our residents and our owners because we've built relationships rather than treating them as interchangeable suppliers. That has genuine value when a boiler dies at an inconvenient moment or something needs looking at urgently, and it is one of the reasons I've never understood the industry's obsession with squeezing every possible penny out of maintenance through commissions and contractor kickbacks.
Sometimes the best improvements aren't particularly complicated
A lot of what we've done at Base over the years has come from asking what a property-management process feels like from the other side. The solutions haven't necessarily involved revolutionary ideas or expensive technology. Often they've been remarkably simple.
We keep a stock of basic appliances, including portable heaters, microwave ovens, hot plates and fridge freezers, because sometimes solving the resident's immediate problem matters more than solving the underlying maintenance issue that second. If your fridge breaks, there may be diagnostics, landlord approval, parts or a replacement appliance to organise, none of which helps the food slowly warming up in your kitchen. Giving you a temporary fridge freezer means the immediate problem disappears while we deal properly with everything else.
We take a similar approach when residents move in. Over the years we've learnt there is absolutely no reliable benchmark for somebody's property knowledge. We've had young residents who are incredibly practical and considerably older, highly successful professionals who have no idea what a consumer unit is. That's why we give residents some basic property-life-skills guidance, including things like where the stopcock and meters are, how to bleed a radiator and some fundamentals around boilers, drains, condensation and mould.
None of that is especially glamorous, but it makes people's lives easier. More importantly, it prevents us from assuming knowledge that may not exist. Showing somebody their stopcock when they move in is considerably more useful than discovering they don't know where it is when water is pouring through the ceiling at 11pm.
The contractor-choice idea feels similar to me. It isn't some enormous reinvention of property management. It is simply recognising that there may be another piece of information we can ask at the right moment which makes a significant difference to the person receiving the service.
Safeguarding exists on both sides of the front door
There was another part of the TaskHer conversation that I think agents should consider more carefully. We naturally started by talking about customers who might feel uncomfortable having an unfamiliar tradesman in their home, but Anna and Paul have also had to think extensively about the safety of the tradeswomen they're sending into properties.
They know who the customer is, where their tradeswomen are working and have processes for dealing with concerns. Anna explained that their tradeswomen are told very clearly that if they ever feel remotely uncomfortable, they should leave and TaskHer will deal with the consequences. Paul also described an occasion when a tradeswoman's partner couldn't contact her and became worried. Because TaskHer sat within the transaction, they were able to contact the customer, establish that she was safely working in a basement with poor mobile reception and get a message to her.
That example is important because agents send people into unfamiliar properties all the time. The industry has a particularly sobering history around lone working, and responsible agencies already have procedures designed to protect members of their own teams. At Base we have safeguarding messages and mechanisms for staff to signal if something doesn't feel right, because the fact that serious incidents are rare doesn't mean the risk should be ignored.
A genuinely thoughtful maintenance process therefore needs to consider both people involved in that interaction. The resident deserves to feel comfortable about who is coming through their front door, and the contractor deserves to know that somebody knows where they are and has their back if something doesn't feel right. Neither should be treated as secondary to simply getting the job marked as completed.
Awareness isn't the same thing as having all the answers
Base was co-founded by a woman, An Deckers, and today we have a predominantly LGBTQ+ team. I've also learnt an enormous amount over the years through our involvement with Women in Estate Agency, particularly from speakers discussing experiences and considerations that simply wouldn't naturally occur to me because I haven't lived them.
I don't mention any of that because it somehow means Base automatically gets these things right. Quite the reverse, really. After more than two decades in property management, my conversation with Anna and Paul made me realise there was something quite obvious that we'd never properly considered. The useful thing about awareness isn't believing you now understand everybody else's experience; it's becoming better at recognising the limits of your own.
That is why I don't want to turn this into a grand claim that Base has solved another problem. We haven't implemented this yet. We're exploring how working with TaskHer might fit into our operations, and their move into smaller maintenance jobs makes that possibility much more practical than it was when we first met. I hope it is something we can make work because I would genuinely love residents to have that additional choice.
The measure of success wouldn't be how many women select a female contractor. If we introduce it and most residents tick “don't mind”, that's absolutely fine. The value is in the fact that the person for whom it does matter no longer has to summon the confidence to ask.
Renting done right means remaining curious
We've increasingly used the phrase renting done right to describe Base, although the philosophy behind it has been there since An and I started the business in 2004. It doesn't mean believing we've discovered some perfect formula for property management. Homes, people and relationships are far too complicated for that.
For me, it means continuing to question the small assumptions that accumulate around our industry. Why do we do it this way? What does this process feel like for the owner? What does it feel like for the resident? Is there a simple thing we could change that would make somebody's life noticeably easier? Sometimes the answer leads to a significant operational change, and sometimes it leads to a cupboard containing a spare fridge freezer.
This time, it has left me thinking differently about something as ordinary as booking a contractor. As agents, we quite rightly spend a lot of effort making sure the person we send is competent, trustworthy, insured, reliable and reasonably priced. Perhaps excellent property management requires us to consider one more thing: whether they're the person our resident would feel most comfortable allowing through their front door.
Because we're not simply sending a contractor to a property. We're asking somebody to let a stranger into their home, and there is a meaningful difference between the two.
