Portfolio and bulk fire risk assessments from £99

Portfolio instructions come from organisations that hold or manage more than a handful of buildings and need the compliance position for all of them to be visible in one place. The problem is rarely the assessment itself — it is that assessments were bought piecemeal over several years, from different suppliers, in different formats, with review dates nobody is tracking. The result is a folder of PDFs that cannot be compared and a renewal cycle that is discovered only when a leaseholder, insurer or enforcement officer asks.

We start with a schedule of the properties: address, building type, storeys, number of units, whether there are commercial parts, and any known review dates. From that we produce one fixed price for the whole programme, broken down per property so it can be recharged to individual service charges where needed. Visits are then blocked geographically rather than alphabetically, so an assessor covers several buildings in the same area on the same day — which is the main reason bulk pricing works. Reports follow within 24 hours of each visit, and a portfolio summary lands at the end showing every building, its risk rating and its highest-priority actions on one page.

The individual PAS 79 reports are the legal record. The portfolio summary is the management tool. It sets out every property side by side with its overall risk rating, the number of immediate, short-term and long-term actions, the review date, and the recurring themes across the estate. Most clients use it for two things: building a remedial works budget for the year, and evidencing to a board, an insurer or a lender that the estate is being managed rather than reacted to.

There is nothing clever about portfolio pricing. Most of the cost of a single assessment is the assessor's travel and the setup time for a one-off job. When several buildings are surveyed in the same area on the same day, and the schedule, access arrangements and reporting template are agreed once rather than fifteen times, the per-property cost falls. That is where the discount comes from — a 5% reduction from two properties, 10% from five, and 15% from ten. What does not change is the time spent inside each building: portfolio pricing buys efficiency in logistics, never a shorter survey.

The single biggest cause of a slipped portfolio programme is access. Riser cupboards locked with a key nobody can find, plant rooms controlled by a separate contractor, roof access needing a permit, or leaseholders who were never told a visit was happening. We send an access checklist per property at the point of booking and confirm arrangements before the assessor sets off. Where a building cannot be fully accessed on the day, the report records exactly what could not be inspected rather than quietly omitting it — an assessment with an undocumented gap is worse than one with a stated limitation.

Fire risk assessments are reviewed periodically — commonly annually for higher-risk residential blocks and every one to two years for lower-risk premises, with an immediate review after significant change. If an entire portfolio was assessed in the same month, the whole cost lands in the same month every year. On larger estates we can deliberately stagger the first cycle so renewals spread across the year, smoothing both the spend and the assessor workload. It also means remedial works are discovered in a steady flow rather than all at once.

Agents taking on new management contracts inherit whatever the previous agent left behind. Our usual approach is a triage: identify buildings with no assessment at all or one over two years old, assess those first, then work through the rest. Where an existing assessment is recent but was produced remotely or by an assessor whose competence cannot be evidenced, we will say so plainly rather than automatically reassessing — you should not pay twice for work that is genuinely adequate.

Scope does not change because a property is part of a portfolio. Every building receives a full PAS 79 assessment by an assessor who physically attends.

Most portfolios need more than fire risk assessments. Fire door inspections under Regulation 10, emergency lighting certification, alarm servicing and asbestos surveys usually run on separate cycles with separate suppliers. Where it helps, we combine them into the same visit schedule so a building is entered once rather than four times, and energy work — EPCs, MEES and Part L — can run alongside through Team EPC, the energy practice owned by our lead assessor.

Per-property prices follow the same bands as a single instruction — from £99 for a small single-storey property, £149 to £349 for a two-storey communal block, £349 to £449 for three to six storeys, and upwards from there for taller or mixed-use buildings — with the portfolio discount applied on top. For estates over roughly twenty-five properties we price the programme individually rather than by the calculator, because scheduling and reporting are then the larger part of the work. Every portfolio quote is fixed in writing before the first visit.