Photo by Jolly Property
Are your HMO properties prepared for the winter months? Property management, particularly keeping up with maintenance and repairs, is often considered one of the more challenging parts of HMO investment. And the cold and damp winter months can make this even more difficult!
In this blog post, we’ll be talking about the importance of making sure your HMO properties are prepared for the colder and damp weather throughout winter, and I’ll also include some of my top tips on how to do this effectively.
Why You Need to Prepare for Winter
As a HMO landlord, you want to ensure your tenants are content living in your property throughout the entire year as this can make them want to stay longer and can improve your profits. But it’s also just key that all your tenants remain safe, warm and dry!
With the colder and damper months already settling in, there can be a whole raft of problems that crop up in HMO properties, including frozen pipes, blocked guttering, drafts from windows and doors, broken boilers and radiators and condensation and mould developing.
With all of these potential issues you could face as a HMO landlord and the risks that come with them, it’s important that you’re staying on top of anything you can do to better prepare your properties for the winter months! And it’s also crucial to make sure that you’re keeping utility costs down as much as possible.
5 Tips to Help You Prep Your HMO Properties & Tenants
When letting out any rental properties, they must be kept in good working order, and you need to stay on top of all of the maintenance or repairs that come up. But there are many ways you can more easily prepare for the cold and keep maintenance costs down, saving you time in the long run.
There are some simple solutions to help ensure your HMO properties are prepared for winter ahead of time, so here are five of my top pieces of advice!
1. Be Proactive, Not Reactive
Don’t wait for things to go wrong. This is especially important over the course of the winter months. Being proactive before the coldest months hit can help ensure your property is prepared beforehand, which can save you time and money later on. So, don’t be reactive and wait around for things to happen before you deal with them!
2. Undertake Property Health Checks
Undertaking property health checks and inspections of your HMOs regularly is also key as this can help you identify any maintenance issues, such as some of the most common problems that happen during winter.
Check internal and external parts of your properties thoroughly for anything that could become bigger issues in the colder and damper months. Look out for problems with guttering, roofs, boilers, radiators, windows, doors and any potential leaks.
3. Get Your Boilers Serviced
Ideally, you’ll want to get your boilers serviced in the autumn every single year! This will help ensure they’re operating as efficiently as possible. Throughout the year, top up the pressure and manage and maintain the status of your boilers.
4. Insulate & Draft Proof Your Properties
One of the things you can check for and fix are any drafts coming through doors or windows. This is especially important as tenants are very aware of these issues nowadays, and it can save about £125 on energy bills per year in a HMO!
Additionally, insulating hot water tanks and pipes is incredibly easy and cheap to do. This can save about £70 per year, and if you have a big system, the savings can be even higher.
5. Share Guidance with Your Tenants
It’s also helpful to provide guidance on how your tenants can be more economical with their gas and electricity usage, because otherwise, it could cause their rents or bills to increase in the future. And it’s important to share this information before they need it!
You can share advice such as closing the curtains in the evenings, using appliances less, turning the lights off when they’re not in use and switching off standby modes. It’s helpful to remind tenants how to cut down on mould and condensation throughout the property too, especially before heading into winter.
For more useful insights on managing your HMO properties, become a member of The HMO Roadmap! and if you’d like to talk to experienced property investors about this, join us over in our Facebook Group The HMO Community.
About the Author:
Andy Graham is the founder and the lead trainer at The HMO Roadmap! He is also the co-founder of The HMO Mastermind. He writes as a regular columnist in different magazines about a variety of HMO topics and is the host of The HMO Podcast! Follow Andy on Instagram!