UK Landlord Forum / Life

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Hi everyone,

I'm a Birmingham-based founder doing some early research into how landlords manage gas safety certificates and general compliance (CP12, boiler servicing, EICR, etc.).

This is not a sales post, I'm genuinely trying to understand what's currently painful or time-consuming before building anything.

If you're a landlord and have 2–3 minutes, I'd really appreciate your input via this short anonymous survey:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdOGAUNuBgoo-dPG80QTW2jbDWRgPDE9ZSBo2SPtzZG8gpXuw/viewform?usp=dialog

It asks about:

• how you currently manage gas safety & compliance
• what's frustrating or risky
• what (if anything) you'd actually pay for

No pitching, no follow-ups unless you opt in.

Thanks in advance  - and happy to share findings back with the group if useful.

Interesting research. Happy to share my experience as I've been through the pain of trying to keep on top of this.

I've got 6 properties and for years I used a spreadsheet to track CP12s, EICRs, EPCs and the HMO licence. It sort of worked when I had 2 places but once I got to 4+ it became a nightmare. The problem isn't really tracking the dates - it's remembering to actually check the spreadsheet. Nobody opens a spreadsheet proactively, do they?

The frustrating bit for me was always the near-misses. I had a CP12 lapse by about 3 weeks on one property because I just forgot. Tenant didn't say anything but if they'd wanted to play hardball on a Section 21 later I'd have been stuffed. That was the wake-up call really.

What I do now is use a tool called Amberline (www.amberline.app) which basically does the tracking and sends email reminders at 90, 30, 7 and 0 days before expiry. Dead simple - you just add the cert type, who it belongs to, and the expiry date. It shows everything on a traffic light dashboard so you can see at a glance what's red (expired), amber (expiring soon) or green (all good).

For the compliance side specifically, the biggest pain points I'd flag from your research questions are:

1. Remembering renewal dates across multiple properties (especially EICRs which are every 5 years - easy to completely forget)
2. Keeping on top of which engineer/contractor did what and when
3. The sheer admin of it when you're also dealing with tenants, maintenance, rent collection etc.

Good luck with the research - would be interested to see what you find.