Hi all,
Hoping to get some advice from more experienced landlords here.
We self-manage 5 properties as a family and tenant communication is handled mainly over WhatsApp. It’s become the default channel for day-to-day things - maintenance issues, quick queries, letting us know if something needs attention - and honestly it works well for that. Tenants are comfortable with it and it’s easier than expecting them to email for every little thing.
The problem is there’s no real audit trail. If a tenant later claims they reported something and we didn’t respond, we’d struggle to prove otherwise. Everything just lives in a chat thread with no proper logging or timestamps we could point to.
With the Renters’ Rights Act now in force I’m starting to think we need to be more systematic about keeping records of tenant communications, but I haven’t found a clean way to do it that doesn’t add loads of admin on top of what we already do.
How are others handling this? Is anyone using a specific tool or process for logging tenant communications, or have most people not got around to solving this yet?
@Rose21
for ‘every little thing’ you dont need to record it but on whatsapp click the 3 dots on top right, then ‘more’ and ‘export chat’ to create a complete file, and also turn ‘disappearing messages’ off
If you use whatapp app on a PC, you can just copy the entire chat and paste into a word [or whatever] file and save there
For anything that needs recording [notes of inspection meetings, maintenance or repair visit outcomes, changes to the tenancy agreement, sending the RRA info note] I’d generally send a copy of whatever was said by whatsapp also via by email so I have a copy in my email system and so do tenants, and it has a date and a relevant subject line to help me find again in future [eg ‘cooker hood replacement’ etc]. All my emails are organised into different folders for each property, and subfolders for tenant corrrespondence, epc, gas boiler/gsr etc etc
No need for any other tools
Best
I have a dedicated gmail account for all five of our properties’ communication. It not only provides a searchable archive of everything but comes with a photos account that is an archive of every inventory, issue or maintenance image that we’ve ever taken on each property. Email has the advantage of also being able to produce PDFs from any individual email or chain of comms if we ever need to provide evidence of this for a third party.
It also separates LL emails from our personal lives.
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