What to check before a contractor touches a managed property (2026)

Why a quick glance at a certificate is not a check

A contractor sends over their paperwork, it looks like the right pile of documents, and it gets waved through. The trouble is that the failures that matter are rarely obvious at a glance. A certificate can be the correct type and still be three weeks expired. The insurance attached can be a real certificate, just not the policy currently in force, or not in the trading name you are contracting with. The cover can be valid but below the level your management agreement or the freeholder requires. None of that jumps out when you are scanning an attachment between calls, and none of it is the contractor trying to deceive you - it is usually just the wrong file pulled from a crowded folder.

Before a contractor sets foot on a property you manage, these are the checks worth doing properly, and the points where reading the documents carefully, rather than glancing at them, earns its place.

Public liability insurance, and the cover level

Public liability insurance is the baseline for almost any contractor working on a property. It covers injury to third parties or damage to their property caused by the contractor's work, which on a managed property means a tenant, a neighbour, or the building itself. The certificate should be current, in the contractor's trading name, and - the part most often skipped - at a level of cover that suits the work and the building.

A jobbing handyman on a single domestic let is a different risk to a roofing contractor on a block of flats, and many management agreements and freeholders specify a minimum, commonly £5 million and sometimes £10 million. A £1 million policy can be perfectly valid and still fall short of what you are contractually required to insist on. This is why a minimum cover level is worth setting explicitly rather than left to judgement: a certificate below it should be flagged as falling short, not accepted because it happens to be a real certificate for a real, but inadequate, amount.

Employers' liability insurance, where the contractor has staff

If the contractor employs anyone, employers' liability insurance is not optional - it is a legal requirement under the Employers' Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969, generally to a minimum of £5 million, and the certificate must be available. A roofing firm sending three people to a job needs it; a genuine sole trader working alone does not. The point to check is simple: if the work involves a team rather than one person, employers' liability belongs on the list alongside public liability, and its absence is worth a question rather than an assumption.

Gas work: Gas Safe registration

Anyone carrying out gas work in a property must be on the Gas Safe Register. The detail that catches people out is that registration is specific in two ways. It is the individual engineer who is registered, not simply the company, so a company appearing on the register does not tell you the person turning up is qualified. And registration is by category of work - boilers, cookers, fires, commercial - so an engineer registered for domestic boilers is not automatically cleared for the job in front of them. For a managed property with a gas supply, the engineer's registration and categories are one of the few checks that cannot be skipped or softened.

Electrical work: competence and the condition report

For electrical work, competence is demonstrated through membership of a registered competent person scheme such as NICEIC or NAPIT, and that membership is the check on the contractor. Separately, the condition of a property's installation is evidenced by an Electrical Installation Condition Report (EICR), and in England a rented property requires a valid EICR, renewed at least every five years, as set out in the government guidance for the private rented sector. When you onboard an electrical contractor, the scheme membership tells you they are competent to do the work; the EICR is the property record that work produces or relies on.

Asbestos: the buildings built before 2000

Any building built before the year 2000 may contain asbestos, and the common parts of a block of flats count as non-domestic premises, which carries a duty to manage asbestos under the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012. For a contractor, the risk is disturbing an asbestos-containing material without knowing it is there - drilling, cutting or stripping out in an older building. Before intrusive work in a pre-2000 building the relevant survey should be in place, and a contractor who might disturb materials should hold asbestos awareness training. The check here is less about a single certificate and more about whether the contractor will start cutting into an old ceiling before anyone has established what it is made of.

Higher-risk work: a RAMS

For anything beyond routine maintenance - work at height, roofing, anything that affects the structure or other trades - a Risk Assessment and Method Statement is the document that shows the contractor has thought the job through before starting. On work running under a principal contractor or CDM 2015, it is usually expected. A sound RAMS is specific to the job in front of it; a generic template with the company name changed and nothing else is a flag in itself, because it tells you the contractor has not actually assessed this job.

Right to work, identity, and entering occupied homes

Where you are engaging people directly rather than through an established company, identity and right to work can matter, and the government's right to work guidance sets out what counts as evidence. Separately, where a contractor will be entering occupied homes, and especially where tenants may be vulnerable, some agents require a DBS check as a matter of policy. Neither applies to every engagement, but where they do apply they belong in the onboarding form rather than in an awkward conversation after the fact.

Waste: who carries it away

A job that produces waste - a strip-out, a refurbishment, a roof replacement - raises a check that is easy to forget: a contractor transporting that waste must be a registered waste carrier, and you have a duty of care for the waste your property produces. You can confirm a carrier on the public register. For routine maintenance it rarely arises; for anything that fills a skip, it is worth asking before the skip turns up.

A worked example: a submission that looks fine and is not

It helps to see how these checks fail in practice, because they rarely fail one at a time. Take a roofing contractor you are onboarding for a block, where you require £5 million of public liability cover. They submit three documents: a public liability certificate, a second insurance document, and a RAMS.

At a glance it is a complete pile - insurance, more insurance, a method statement, tick. Read properly, it is three problems. The first public liability certificate is genuine but dated last year, and it expired two months ago. The second insurance document is current, which is reassuring until you notice it shows £1 million of cover against the £5 million you required. And the RAMS is a generic template - the hazards listed are the usual ones, but nothing in it is specific to this roof, this access, or this building.

None of those three would reliably survive a careful read, and none of them survives a quick one. Surfaced together, they give you a clear instruction: send it back asking for a current certificate at the right level of cover, and a RAMS written for this job. The contractor sorts it, resubmits, and you approve against documents that are actually in order - rather than approving a pile that looked about right and finding out later that it was not.

What automated review catches that a glance misses

The reason to read documents with a tool rather than by eye is not that people cannot read a certificate. It is that the same person reading the hundredth certificate of the month stops seeing the date. When a contractor's documents are reviewed automatically, each one is read and assessed on the things that actually fail:

• Expiry. The expiry date is extracted and the document is flagged if it has lapsed, or if it expires within the next month, so a soon-to-lapse certificate is caught before it becomes a problem.
• Wrong document. If what was uploaded does not match what was asked for, it is flagged as the wrong type rather than counted as a tick in the box.
• Cover below your minimum. Where you have set a minimum insurance level, a certificate showing less is flagged as falling short, with the shortfall stated.
• A form returned blank. If you ask contractors to complete and return your own form, a copy that comes back empty or barely filled in is flagged rather than assumed to be complete.

You are still the one who approves. The point is to approve against a clear list of what is current, what is expired, what falls short and what needs a second look, rather than against a feeling that the paperwork looked about right.

Building a repeatable check across a portfolio

For a property manager the challenge is rarely checking one contractor once; it is applying the same rigour to every contractor across every property, consistently, when you are busy and the jobs never stop. A repeatable check is what turns that from an impossible ideal into a routine. Rather than deciding afresh each time what to look for, you define once what a given kind of work requires — the insurance level, the registrations, the certificates, the RAMS where it applies — and apply that same standard every time, so a rushed Friday appointment gets the same scrutiny as a planned one. Consistency is what protects you, because the check you skip is always the one that turns out to matter.

The practical way to make a check repeatable is to systematise it: a defined set of requirements per job type, a standard way of requesting and receiving the documents, and a record of what was checked. Done that way, thoroughness stops depending on how much time you happen to have on a given day and becomes simply how you operate. Across a portfolio, that consistency is worth more than occasional deep checks, because risk hides in the properties and contractors that got the quick glance.

Record-keeping: proving you actually checked

In property management it is not enough to have checked a contractor; you need to be able to show that you did, because if something goes wrong the question will be what you knew and when. A check that happened only in your inbox and your memory is hard to evidence later. Keeping a record — which documents you requested, what you received, that they were current and adequate, and when you verified them — turns diligence into something defensible. This matters both for your own protection and for the landlords or leaseholders you act for, who are relying on you to have done it properly.

The record also makes the next cycle easier, because you can see what you hold and when it expires rather than starting from scratch. A manager who can produce, for any property and any contractor, a clear history of the compliance they checked is in a far stronger position than one whose assurance rests on "I'm sure we looked at that". In a role defined by responsibility for other people's safety and property, the audit trail is not bureaucracy; it is the evidence that you did your job.

Keeping contractors compliant between jobs

A contractor who was compliant when you last used them may not be now, and in property management — where you often use the same trades repeatedly across a portfolio — that drift is a real exposure. Insurance renews, registrations lapse, certificates expire, and unless something is tracking those dates you will not know until you need the contractor and discover their cover ran out months ago. The managers who stay on top of this treat their regular contractors' compliance as a live thing to monitor, not a one-time check, so a lapsing certificate is flagged and renewed before it becomes a problem on a job.

This is where doing checks in a system rather than by hand pays off, because tracking expiry across a panel of contractors and a portfolio of properties by memory is simply not feasible. Keeping your trusted trades continuously current means that when a job comes up you can appoint with confidence rather than scrambling to re-verify, and it closes the gap where a once-checked contractor quietly falls out of compliance between appointments.

The cost of a missed check in property management

What raises the stakes in property compliance is that a missed check does not just risk a fine — it can risk a tenant's safety and expose the manager and the landlord to serious liability. Appointing a contractor whose gas or electrical competence was never properly verified, or whose insurance had lapsed, turns a routine repair into a potential disaster if the work is unsafe or something goes wrong. The consequences range from financial penalties and invalidated insurance to, in the worst cases, harm to the people living in the property. Against that, the effort of a proper, recorded check is small.

This asymmetry is the whole argument for taking contractor checks seriously in property management: the check is quick and routine, the failure is severe and badly timed. A manager who treats every appointment as needing the same verified, recorded check is not being over-cautious; they are managing a genuine risk in the only way that reliably works. In this sector, good compliance is measured less in efficiency gained and more in disasters quietly prevented.

Making checks quick enough to actually do

The uncomfortable truth about contractor checks in property management is that the reason they get skipped is rarely negligence — it is time. When a boiler fails on a Friday and a tenant is without heat, the pressure is to get someone out fast, and a thorough manual check of insurance and competence feels like a luxury you cannot afford in the moment. That is exactly when uninsured or unverified contractors slip through, not because the manager did not care but because the proper check was too slow for the situation. The only reliable fix is to make the check quick enough that there is no reason to skip it even under pressure.

That means having a fast, standard way to request and verify a contractor's compliance — ideally one where the documents are reviewed for you and the gaps flagged, so a check takes minutes rather than an afternoon of reading certificates. When verifying a contractor is quick, thoroughness stops competing with urgency, and even the Friday-afternoon emergency gets the same check as a planned job. In a role where the skipped check is always the one that matters, making the check fast is not a convenience; it is what makes doing it properly, every time, actually possible.

A note on advice

The specific cover levels, certificate types, surveys and checks that apply to your properties depend on your management agreements, the freeholder's requirements, the age and type of building, and the work involved. This is general guidance, not legal or insurance advice. Confirm the requirements that bind you with your own legal and insurance advisers.