A repair in social housing is never just a repair. It is a tenant sleeping in a cold room, a complaint heading toward the Ombudsman, a compliance clock ticking, and a satisfaction score that will eventually be published. Landlords are now judged on how quickly they respond to hazards, how well they evidence every statutory check, and how honestly they report what tenants actually experience — and the gap between a well-run repairs service and a struggling one is almost always visibility rather than effort. OxMaint maintenance management software gives housing teams one live picture of every property, every open job and every compliance stream. Start a free OxMaint trial or book a 30-minute demo and see the whole stock on one dashboard.
OxMaint Property Management — Social Housing
Social Housing Repairs and Maintenance Software
Run responsive repairs, damp and mould response, void turnarounds, planned works and the full compliance programme from a single platform — with mobile operatives, tracked contractors and evidence that stands up to any regulator or Ombudsman review.
Hours
not weeks, is now the expected window for investigating a reported serious hazard
Six
major compliance streams every landlord must evidence continuously across the stock
Every void
day a property sits empty is rent lost that no planned works budget ever recovers
Published
tenant satisfaction measures make repairs performance visible to everyone, openly
The Pressure
Why Repairs Performance Became the Sector's Defining Issue
Social housing repairs used to be judged internally, on volumes and average days. That era has ended. Regulation now looks past the averages at the individual tenant experience — how a report was received, how quickly a hazard was investigated, whether the tenant was kept informed, and whether the landlord could demonstrate all of it afterwards. Consumer standards place explicit expectations on the quality and safety of homes and on landlords knowing the condition of their stock. Tenant satisfaction measures publish the outcome. And damp and mould in particular has moved from a maintenance category to a safety obligation with defined response timescales. What all of this has in common is that it is impossible to satisfy with a repairs service that cannot see itself. If a landlord cannot answer "what is open, on which property, for how long, and who is doing it?" instantly, everything downstream becomes a reconstruction exercise.
Hazard response
Reports of damp, mould and other serious hazards now carry expectations around investigation and remedy within defined periods, with written communication to the tenant. Recording when a report arrived, when it was inspected, what was found and what was done is no longer good practice — it is the substance of the duty itself, and the absence of a timestamp is the absence of a defence.
Stock knowledge
Landlords are expected to hold accurate, up-to-date information about the condition of their homes. That means a real asset register at property and component level, refreshed by surveys and by every repair that touches it, rather than a spreadsheet inherited from a stock transfer and patched by memory since.
Tenant voice
Complaints handling and satisfaction measures put the tenant's account of the service on public record. Landlords who can show a clear chronology of contact, appointments, attendance and outcome are in an entirely different position to those whose evidence is a call log and an operative's recollection.
Building safety
For taller residential blocks, safety case requirements, resident engagement duties and golden thread information add a documentary layer on top of everyday repairs. Fire door checks, communal system servicing and structural information all need to sit in an accessible, current record rather than in archived files.
Repair Priorities
Four Response Bands, One Clock That Never Stops
Almost every landlord operates a priority ladder, and almost every landlord struggles to prove adherence to it. The difficulty is that the clock starts at the moment of report — often a phone call, sometimes a portal message, occasionally a note to a housing officer — and the job only becomes visible once someone has typed it into a system. Every minute between those two events is invisible time that still counts against you. OxMaint timestamps at the point of report, applies the target automatically by category, and escalates before the target is breached rather than after.
Emergency
Make safe immediately
Total loss of heating or hot water in cold weather, uncontainable leaks, electrical danger, insecure properties, blocked sole toilet, serious structural risk. The objective is to remove danger first and complete the repair afterwards, and both stages need recording separately — a job closed as "made safe" that was never followed up is one of the most common sources of complaint escalation.
Urgent
Attend within days
Faults that materially affect living conditions without posing immediate danger: partial heating failure, minor leaks, faulty extractor fans, defective locks on internal doors, failed sockets. This band is where appointment discipline matters most, because these are the jobs tenants take time off work for and the ones where a missed slot does lasting damage to trust.
Routine
Appointed and completed
The bulk of the workload — joinery, plastering, tiling, general plumbing, decoration after works. Volume is the challenge rather than urgency, and the risk is quiet backlog growth. Without a live view of ageing jobs by trade and by patch, routine work accumulates unnoticed until the average days figure moves and nobody can explain why.
Planned
Programmed into cycles
Kitchen and bathroom renewals, roofing, windows, boiler replacements, external decoration. Driven by component age and condition rather than by tenant report. The best-run landlords use responsive repair history to challenge the programme — a property generating repeated boiler call-outs should move up the renewal list, and that argument only exists if the history is structured.
The single biggest improvement most repairs services can make is not speed but first-time fix. A job attended twice consumes two appointments, two travel legs and two sets of tenant patience. Capturing the right diagnostic detail at the point of report — with tenant photographs where possible — and giving the operative the property's full repair history before they arrive is what turns a second visit into a first-time completion.
OxMaint for Housing Providers
If a Tenant Reported Damp Six Weeks Ago, You Should Not Have to Search Three Systems to Find Out What Happened
OxMaint holds every report, inspection, appointment, attendance, photograph and completion against the property itself. One chronology per home, one dashboard for open work across the stock, and an evidence trail assembled as the work happens rather than after a complaint lands.
Compliance Streams
The Six Programmes That Must Never Slip
Running alongside repairs is a set of statutory programmes that operate on their own cycles and are judged on completion percentage rather than average performance. A landlord at ninety-nine percent on gas safety is not ninety-nine percent compliant — they have a specific list of properties with no valid certificate, and each one is a named risk. The value of a single system is that the same asset register that drives repairs also drives these, so no property can exist in one view and not the other.
Gas safety
Annual safety checks on every gas appliance and flue in a rented property, with a record issued to the tenant. The operational challenge is access, not engineering — so the system needs to track attempted visits, no-access letters and escalation as rigorously as it tracks completed certificates.
Electrical safety
Periodic inspection of fixed installations at defined intervals, with remedial work following any unsatisfactory result. Remedials are the weak point: a report that identifies coded faults must generate tracked jobs, not sit as a filed PDF with an assumption that someone dealt with it.
Fire safety
Risk assessments for blocks with communal areas, plus servicing of alarms, emergency lighting, extinguishers and dry risers, and routine fire door checks where required. Actions arising from each assessment need owners and dates or the assessment becomes a list of known unfixed risks.
Asbestos
A management survey and register for properties likely to contain asbestos-containing materials, with condition re-inspection and information made available before any intrusive work. The register must be visible to operatives at the point of job allocation, not held centrally where nobody checks it.
Water hygiene
Risk assessment and control for communal water systems, tanks and little-used outlets, with voids and low-occupancy properties carrying particular stagnation risk. Flushing regimes during void periods are routinely forgotten precisely because nobody is living there to notice.
Lifts and equipment
Passenger lifts, stairlifts and hoists require statutory examination and servicing, with breakdown response affecting residents directly. Examination reports frequently contain defect classifications that need immediate action, and those need to become work orders automatically.
Void Turnaround
Where Days Disappear and How to Get Them Back
Void performance is the clearest financial metric in housing management, and the one most often lost to handoffs rather than to actual work. A void rarely takes thirty days because the repairs took thirty days. It takes thirty days because the property waited four days for a pre-inspection, six for a decision on scope, five for a contractor to be instructed, three for a gas cap-off, and a week for a post-works clean nobody had ordered. Each gap is invisible in isolation and enormous in aggregate.
1
Keys returned, clock starts
The void is created the moment the tenancy ends, not when someone gets round to inspecting. Standing tasks for utilities, security and safety trigger immediately rather than waiting on a surveyor's diary.
2
Inspection and scope
A structured survey on mobile produces the works schedule, rechargeable items and photographs in one visit, removing the second trip that a handwritten scope almost always requires.
3
Trades scheduled in parallel
Where sequencing allows, trades are instructed together rather than one after another. Visibility of who is booked for which day is what prevents a property sitting idle between two contractors.
4
Safety checks completed
Gas, electrical and water checks are scheduled as part of the void programme rather than discovered as blockers at the end, which is the single most common cause of a property being ready but not lettable.
5
Sign-off and let
A final quality check closes the void with evidence attached, and the property's new condition data carries forward into its repair and planned works history for the next tenancy.
Because every void task is a tracked work order, the reporting shows where time is genuinely being lost — waiting for instruction, waiting for a trade, waiting for a certificate. That is a far more useful conversation than an average void figure, because it points at a specific process step somebody can actually fix.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Can operatives and contractors both work in the same system?
Yes. Direct labour and external contractors receive jobs, update status, add photographs and complete work on mobile, so one chronology exists per property regardless of who attended.
Book a demo to see it.
How does it help with damp and mould reporting?
Reports are timestamped on arrival, categorised, and tracked against response targets with automatic escalation. Inspection findings, photographs, remedial works and follow-up visits all stay attached to the property record.
Will it track no-access attempts for compliance visits?
It will. Attempted visits, letters and escalation steps are recorded against the property, so the gap between a missing certificate and a genuine access problem is evidenced rather than assumed.
Can we see repair history when planning major works?
Yes. Component-level history shows which properties are consuming disproportionate responsive spend, letting you justify renewal decisions with data.
Start free to load your stock.
How long does implementation usually take?
Most providers load properties, job categories and priority targets within days, then bring operatives and contractors on progressively. Existing certificates can be attached so compliance history carries over immediately.
OxMaint AI — Social Housing Repairs and Maintenance
Tenants Judge You on the Repair. Regulators Judge You on the Record. Get Both Right at Once.
OxMaint gives housing providers property-level asset records, timestamped repair reporting with priority escalation, mobile operatives and contractors, void pipeline tracking, and live completion reporting across gas, electrical, fire, asbestos, water and lift compliance. Faster fixes, shorter voids, and an evidence trail that builds itself.
