estate agent maintenance contractor
How to Win Recurring Maintenance Work from Local Estate Agents
One good letting agent can fill the gaps in your diary all year. The formula for winning them: email the property manager (never the sales team) with a rate card for common small jobs and a response-time promise, then make your first jobs and invoices effortless. Agents churn through unreliable contractors constantly - the bar you need to clear is lower than you think, and the work repeats forever once you clear it.
Why agents beat one-off domestic work
A managed lettings book generates constant reactive maintenance: tenants report faults, landlords must fix them, and the property manager in the middle needs insured, responsive trades with clean paperwork on speed dial. Win one agent and you've won a pipeline - typically steady small jobs at slightly keener rates, with no marketing cost, no quoting battles against five other firms, and invoices that actually get paid because there's a business process behind them.
Step 1: Build a rate card for common small jobs
Before contacting anyone, build the thing that makes you easy to use: a one-page rate card. Fixed or capped prices for the usual suspects - tap washers and leaks, sockets and light fittings, locks and handles, sealant and mould washes, gutter clears - plus an hourly rate and call-out terms for anything odd. The property manager's job is telling landlords what things cost; a rate card means they can approve you without a phone call.
Step 2: Find the property manager, not the sales team
This is where most trades waste their effort. The people in the window selling houses have nothing to do with maintenance. You want the property manager or maintenance coordinator on the lettings side - the person tenants ring when the boiler dies. Ring reception and ask who looks after maintenance for managed properties, get a name and a direct email, and build a list of every lettings agent within your working radius.
Step 3: Send a short, specific outreach email
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Swap in your trade and numbers, keep it that short, and attach the rate card as a PDF. The email works because it answers the only three questions a property manager has: are you safe to use, what will you cost, and how fast will you turn up.
Step 4: Follow up once, then be patient
Property managers rarely need a new contractor on the day you email - they need one the day their regular lets them down, which is often. One polite follow-up after a week, then stop. Plenty of trades get their first call months after the email, precisely because it was filed under 'sounds organised'. Persistence past two messages reads as pestering and undoes the impression.
Step 5: Treat the first three jobs as your audition
The first jobs will be small and unglamorous - that's deliberate. What's being tested is everything around the work: did you respond inside your promised window, was the tenant comfortable, did photos and a tidy invoice arrive the same day, did the invoice reference the property and job number so their system swallows it without a query. Pass that test three times and you tend to become the default number they dial.
Step 6: Review the numbers quarterly and hold your standards
Expect rates a notch below your domestic pricing - that's the honest trade for guaranteed volume and zero customer acquisition cost. What you must protect is the hourly reality: every quarter, check what agent work actually pays once travel and waiting are counted, and renegotiate the rate card annually rather than skirmishing over individual jobs. A calm yearly conversation keeps the relationship; job-by-job haggling kills it.
From the tools: my brother sent that exact style of email to six letting agents near him in spring 2024, rate card attached. Two replied; one gave him a trial - a single extractor fan swap. He turned it round the same day, photos on the invoice, job reference on everything. Eighteen months later that one agent is worth around £1,100 a month in landlord safety checks, socket repairs and small remedials, invoiced monthly and paid like clockwork. Four of the six never answered at all, and it didn't matter. His take: one yes from six emails was the best marketing return the firm has ever had.
Agents stay loyal to trades whose paperwork never needs chasing - Quotato sends branded quotes and same-day invoices from your phone, photos attached, in seconds.
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