If you do gas or electrical work for landlords, your calendar already belongs to other people’s deadlines. Every rented property with a gas appliance needs a fresh Gas Safety Record, the CP12, once a year without fail. And since 1 June 2020, rented homes in England have needed an electrical safety check, the EICR, at least every five years (gov.uk guidance). There are roughly 4.6 million privately rented homes in England, about one in five of all homes, and every one of them with the right appliances is a standing appointment waiting to be booked.
On paper that’s the best news in your business. A legal reason to go back to the same customer, on a date you already know, year after year. In practice most firms treat each renewal like a surprise. The dates live in someone’s head, on a job sheet in the van, or in a spreadsheet that only gets opened when a landlord rings up flustered because their certificate expired yesterday.
That costs you twice over. Good customers you’d happily keep for a decade quietly drift off because nobody reminded them, and they book whoever answers the phone first. And your year takes on a daft shape, quiet for months and then every CP12 you ever issued seems to come due in the same fortnight, so you’re doing certificates on a Saturday to keep up.
So most of the gap between you and a fuller diary isn’t skill or price. It’s the simple business of remembering who’s due, and when, before the landlord forgets you exist. That’s a job worth handing to something that never forgets.
What a recall actually has to track
A CP12 is the easy one. Annual, full stop. You sign it off in June, it’s due again next June, and the only thing standing between you and the rebooking is whether anyone reminds the landlord while your name is still the one they’d ring.
The EICR is where a generic reminder falls apart, because the certificate isn’t always finished when you walk out the door. An EICR comes back either satisfactory or unsatisfactory, and what tips it into unsatisfactory is the remedial codes the inspecting electrician writes against any observation:
- C1 means danger is present. There’s an immediate risk of injury, an exposed live conductor, a missing consumer-unit cover, that sort of thing, and it needs sorting then and there, not next week.
- C2 means potentially dangerous. No live risk this minute, but it could become one, a broken earth, damaged insulation, a socket sat too close to a sink. It still has to be put right.
- FI means further investigation is required. Something looked off and there wasn’t enough on the day to call it safe or unsafe, so it gets flagged for a proper look.
Any C1, C2 or FI on the report makes the whole EICR unsatisfactory. The landlord isn’t compliant on the strength of a piece of paper with a fault code on it. The remedial work has to be done and the relevant circuits re-tested before a satisfactory certificate stands. So an EICR isn’t one appointment, it’s potentially three touchpoints: the inspection, the remedials, and the re-test that closes it out. A reminder that only knows “EICR every five years” will happily tell the landlord they’re sorted while a C2 sits open and the certificate is worth nothing.
That’s the difference between a calendar alert and a recall that understands your trade. A landlord with thirty doors needs the whole portfolio held as one relationship, with each property at its own stage, not thirty disconnected alarms that all nag on the same morning. One flat might be sitting on a clean CP12 due in four months; another might have an EICR with a C2 still open from the last visit; a third might be coming up to its five-year electrical check. If a landlord like that gets a wall of identical “your certificate is due” texts on the same day, half of them wrong, they stop reading them, and the first thing they do when one genuinely expires is ring the firm that didn’t pester them about the ones that hadn’t.
Get that wrong and the reminder does the opposite of its job: it trains your best customer to ignore you. Build the recall around the certificates you genuinely issue and the codes they genuinely carry, and it’s something you’ll leave running for years rather than switch off the first week it nags the wrong landlord about the wrong door.
What it does once it’s running
The moment you sign off a CP12, or close out an EICR as satisfactory, the next one is logged with its due date attached. A few weeks before it’s up, the landlord hears from you automatically: your name, the property address, the date the certificate runs out, and a one-tap way to get you back in the diary. No reply, and it nudges again, the way you would yourself if you ever had a spare hour. They book, it lands in your calendar; you finish the job, the clock resets, and the whole thing comes round again without you lifting a finger.
You’re no longer the one holding all the dates in your head. And because the first nudge goes out early, you can pull renewals forward into the slow weeks rather than letting them all crash into August. The same jobs, spread across a year that finally has a shape you can plan around. That early-warning habit is the same one that stops new enquiries going cold, and it’s worth reading why a missed enquiry costs more than the job itself alongside this, because the two problems have the same root: work that depended on you remembering in time.
What the repeat work is actually worth
It’s easy to wave this off as a few reminders. Put numbers on it and it stops looking small.
Say you issue around 120 landlord CP12s a year at roughly £80 each. Most of those are renewable, but in practice a chunk slip every year, because nobody chased them. If an automatic recall rebooks around 70% of them, here’s where that lands:
| Certs/year | Avg fee | Rebook rate | Recurring revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| 120 | £80 | 70% (≈84 certs) | ≈ £6,720 |
Illustrative figures.
That’s roughly £6,720 of repeat work you’d otherwise be chasing from memory, or just losing, and it’s the steadiest kind of money you can have: booked a year ahead against a legal deadline you already know is coming. The EICRs stack on top, and so does whatever extra work falls out of being the firm already standing in the property, the boiler service the landlord throws in while you’re there, the dodgy socket the tenant mentions, the second property they’d forgotten about. None of that lands if a competitor got the renewal call first.
It also smooths that August pile-up into the quiet months, which is worth real money on its own: a January with paid work in it instead of a January spent waiting for the phone. And it’s only one slice of the admin tax most trades pay without ever putting a figure on it, which is the whole subject of what your admin really costs you. The renewals you forget to chase don’t show up as a loss on any invoice, which is exactly why they’re so easy to bleed.
What we’d build
This is one of the patterns we build and run for trades: a recurring-service recall scoped to your certificates, your renewal rules, your remedial follow-ups and your diary, wired to the tools you already use. We agree the cost in writing, then host it and keep it running, so it quietly turns last year’s work into next year’s bookings.
Here’s a number worth working out before you talk to anyone: how many CP12s and EICRs did you issue last year? That’s roughly how many repeat visits are already sitting in your records, waiting to be asked for. Tell us how you track renewals now and we’ll sketch what we’d build to stop any of them slipping.