Fire risk assessments for property management companies from £99

Management companies occupy an uncomfortable position in the Fire Safety Order, and it is worth being precise about it. The responsible person is whoever has control of the premises, and control is a question of fact rather than of contract wording. Where your management agreement gives you control of the common parts, day-to-day maintenance and the appointment of contractors, you are very likely a responsible person in your own right — jointly with the freeholder or the landlord client, not instead of them. That means the duty to ensure a suitable and sufficient assessment exists, and that its findings are acted on, is yours as well as theirs, and it cannot be transferred back by pointing at the client. It also means the practical exposure is real: enforcement action, and the professional consequences of a client discovering after an incident that the building they pay you to manage had no current assessment.

Rarely through negligence. Almost always through administration. A building is taken on mid-year with inherited paperwork nobody has read. An assessment expires while a property manager is on maternity leave and the reminder sits in her inbox. Three different assessors used over four years produce three incompatible report formats, so nobody can tell whether an action closed out in 2023 is the same action that reappeared in 2025. A landlord client refuses the cost and the file simply goes quiet. Nothing dramatic happens until an incident, a sale, an insurer, or a fire officer asks for the file. The fix is boring and effective: one supplier, one format, one calendar, and a register you can open in front of a client or an officer and read down the page.

It starts with a portfolio review rather than a quote. Send us the property list — addresses, building types, unit numbers, and the date and author of the last assessment where you know it — and we produce a schedule showing which buildings are current, which are overdue, which are undated and therefore unusable, and what the annual cost of putting the whole portfolio on a rolling programme would be. That schedule is useful to you even if you never instruct us, because it is the document you need in front of your clients. From there we agree a survey order, usually worst-first, group the work geographically, and put every property on one renewal calendar. Your property managers get a named contact rather than a switchboard, and access is arranged directly with your site staff.

Very few management companies hold one building type, and generalist assessors struggle with the variety. A single portfolio typically contains purpose-built blocks on a stay-put strategy, Victorian conversions with a single staircase and no compartmentation to speak of, licensed HMOs with their own standard to meet, retail units with flats above where the commercial and residential duties interact, small office suites, and increasingly one or two units being let on short stays without the freeholder's knowledge. Each of these has a different assessment logic, and the last one has a habit of surprising everybody. Our assessors work across all of these every week, and the report tells you which regime applies to which part of the building rather than averaging them.

The report has to work for three different readers. Your property manager needs to know what to instruct and in what order. Your landlord client or board needs to understand why they are being asked to spend money, in language that does not require a fire safety background. An enforcing officer, insurer or purchaser's solicitor needs to see that a competent named person assessed the building against a recognised methodology and reached defensible conclusions. We write for all three: a plain-English summary at the front, a prioritised action plan banded by risk with realistic timescales, photographs against every finding, and the assessor's name, IFSM registration and NFRAR listing on the cover so competence can be verified rather than asserted. Where an action is the freeholder's rather than the leaseholders' or vice versa, the report says so, because that is usually the argument that follows.

An assessment generates actions, and most management companies would rather not appoint five suppliers to close them. We carry out fire door inspections to the quarterly and annual frequencies required by the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, emergency lighting testing to BS 5266, fire alarm servicing to BS 5839, compartmentation and fire-stopping surveys, asbestos surveys and registers, legionella risk assessments, EICRs and EPCs. Bundled onto one schedule, that is one renewal calendar, one invoice run and one contact for a whole building's statutory compliance. What we do not do is the remedial building work our assessments recommend, and that separation is the point: your client can be shown that nobody profited from the length of the action plan.

Per-property pricing starts at £99 and falls with portfolio volume and geographic clustering. Portfolio clients are invoiced monthly against a schedule rather than job by job, and where you need to recharge to individual landlord clients or service charge accounts we itemise accordingly. The starting point is the portfolio review — send the property list and we will come back with the schedule, the gaps and the annual figure, usually within two working days and at no cost.