Short-term let fire risk assessment from £99

For fire safety purposes the label on the listing matters far less than the arrangement underneath it. If people pay to sleep in a property for a short period and it is not their home, the Fire Safety Order applies and the assessment must be written down. That captures serviced apartments and aparthotels, corporate lets for relocating staff, contractor accommodation, insurance and displacement housing, medical-stay accommodation near hospitals, and the growing category of residential flats operated commercially for short stays. It also captures the awkward middle ground — a flat let on rolling 28-day bookings, or a unit that is a short-stay let in summer and an assured shorthold tenancy in winter. Where the use changes across the year, the assessment needs to cover the riskier use, and we say so explicitly in the report.

This is the single most misunderstood situation in the sector, and it produces most of the arguments. If you operate a short-stay flat inside a purpose-built block, there are two assessments in play, not one. The freeholder or managing agent is the responsible person for the common parts — the stairs, the corridors, the communal alarm and lighting, the flat entrance doors as they affect the escape route. You are the responsible person for the way your unit is used, occupied and equipped. Neither party can discharge the other's duty. In practice what goes wrong is that operators assume the block assessment covers them and hold nothing at all, while the managing agent has never been told the flat is being let on short stays and has assessed the building on a stay-put basis that assumes residents who know it. Our assessment for you covers your unit properly, records what we can see of the communal provision, and sets out plainly what to raise with the freeholder — including whether your lease and the block's insurance actually permit short-stay use, which is worth knowing before an enforcement officer asks.

Assessing twenty units one at a time, each with its own quote, its own report format and its own renewal date, is how portfolios end up with gaps. A programme replaces that with one arrangement. We survey in geographic clusters so travel is efficient and the rate reflects it, report every unit in the same format with the same risk banding, and give you a single register showing every property, its assessment date, its renewal date and its open actions. Renewals are diarised and we chase you rather than waiting to be remembered. Where your units are similar — a repeated apartment layout across a building or a scheme — we still survey each one, because the failures we find are almost always about how a specific unit is equipped and used rather than its floor plan, but the reporting overhead comes down and the price with it.

The survey follows PAS 79 and is scaled to the unit, typically taking 30 to 60 minutes for an apartment.

The operational model that makes short-stay lettings work — remote check-in, key safes, smart locks, no staff on site — introduces risks a conventional assessment never had to consider. We look hard at three of them. First, whether every door on the escape route opens from the inside without a key, a code, an app or a charged phone, in the dark, by somebody who arrived four hours ago. Second, what happens in a power cut or a dead battery, because a smart lock that fails secure is a locked exit. Third, whether anybody would know a guest was in the building at all: with no reception and no staff, an evacuation depends entirely on detection and on the guest understanding, from the notice in front of them, what to do. None of this makes remote operation wrong. It makes the detail matter more.

Corporate clients booking staff accommodation increasingly run a supplier questionnaire, and fire safety evidence is on it. Insurers ask at renewal. Local authorities ask when a complaint arrives or when planning use is queried, and in London the 90-night rule under the Deregulation Act 2015 gives them a reason to look. Booking platforms and agencies handling corporate contracts sometimes ask before they will list you. What satisfies all of them is the same thing: a current written assessment per unit, by a named assessor whose registration can be checked, with a prioritised action plan showing what has been closed out. What does not satisfy them is a single assessment of one flat being offered as evidence for eleven.

Single units start at £99 and portfolios are priced per unit, with the rate falling as volume rises and units cluster geographically. There is no travel charge inside the M25 and we cover Essex, Kent, Surrey and Hertfordshire as standard. Turnaround for reports is 24 hours from survey, and surveys are scheduled around your occupancy — most operators give us a window between bookings and we work through a building in a day. Where a corporate deadline or an insurance renewal is driving the timing, say so at the outset and we will work backwards from the date.