11230 – Maintenance

Maintenance covers how a managing agent handles repairs and upkeep across a managed property’s life — from routine requests through to urgent and emergency repairs — balancing the landlord’s cost control against the tenant’s statutory right to a property that’s kept in reasonable repair.

This is also where a managing agent’s day-to-day judgement is tested most often: most maintenance decisions are small individually, but the volume across a portfolio is high, and a pattern of slow or dismissive handling erodes both landlord confidence and tenant goodwill in a way that’s hard to repair with any single gesture. Getting the classification and response speed right, request after request, is what actually builds an agency’s operational reputation.

This entry covers:

• Routine vs. urgent repair classification
• The standard maintenance-request-to-resolution workflow
• Tradesperson coordination and cost approval
• Preventative and scheduled maintenance

This entry does not cover:

• The financial/trust-accounting treatment of maintenance costs → addressed in Financial Management in PM (11240)
• What happens when a tenant and landlord dispute a maintenance issue → addressed in Conflict Resolution for PM (11270)
• The property-condition record used to assess a maintenance claim → addressed in Leasing (11220)

Every state’s residential tenancy legislation imposes a positive obligation on the landlord, in practice coordinated by the managing agent, to keep the property in reasonable repair and to act within short, often specific, timeframes on urgent repairs — a failure here is one of the more common grounds for a tenant to apply to a state tribunal.^1,2,3 Smoke alarm compliance in particular is subject to its own, separately enforced regulations in most states, with specific testing and certification obligations that sit on top of general reasonable-repair duties.

Work health and safety obligations also apply to how repairs are coordinated — engaging appropriately licensed tradespeople for electrical, gas, and structural work is a legal requirement, not a service-quality choice.⁴ The same tenancy legislation that sets urgent-repair timeframes also sets the minimum notice period an agent must give before entering the property, including to carry out an approved repair, and this notice requirement generally applies even where the repair itself is uncontroversial.

Setting Approval Authority in Advance

A pre-agreed approval-authority threshold with each landlord, set before it’s actually needed, is what allows an agency to meet urgent-repair timeframes without either overstepping a landlord’s authority or leaving a genuine emergency unresolved while awaiting contact. This is worth confirming explicitly at the start of every management agreement, not assumed or left implicit.

Running Preventative Maintenance on a Calendar

Preventative maintenance is worth the same discipline as approval authority: a smoke-alarm and gutter-clearing schedule run on a calendar, rather than triggered by a tenant complaint, converts a class of future urgent repairs and compliance failures into routine, budgeted cost — and demonstrates the kind of proactive management that landlords consistently value most.

Common Mistakes

The most common mistake is misclassifying an urgent repair as routine to avoid the cost or hassle of an after-hours callout, which risks both a tribunal application and genuine harm to the tenant. A second is engaging an unlicensed tradesperson for electrical, gas, or structural work to save cost, exposing the agency and landlord to serious liability. The third is skipping the statutory access notice even for a straightforward, tenant-requested repair, which still requires proper notice in most states regardless of how welcome the visit is.

1. Residential Tenancies Act 2010 (NSW) — NSW Legislation
2. Residential Tenancies Act 1997 (Vic) — Victorian Legislation
3. Residential Tenancies and Rooming Accommodation Act 2008 (Qld) — Queensland Legislation
4. Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (NSW) — NSW Legislation