The Between-Tenancy Refresh: A Teesside Landlord's Checklist
What to fix, refresh and check between tenants: a practical checklist for Teesside landlords, ordered by what protects your rent and your asset.
5 min readTeesside Premium
Why the empty week matters
The gap between tenants is the only time you can properly inspect, fix and refresh a property, and every extra empty week on a typical Teesside rent is real money lost. The trick is doing the right jobs in the right order, so here is the checklist we work through for landlords across Middlesbrough and Stockton.
It is worth being honest about the trade-off before you start. Every day the property sits empty costs rent. Every job deferred because the property is occupied costs more when it finally has to be done around a tenant, their furniture and their working hours. The void is cheap access to the whole house, and the list below is ordered so that the cheap access gets spent on the things that are expensive to reach later.
First: the checks that protect you
Before cosmetics, walk the property for the expensive-if-ignored items. Run every tap and flush every toilet looking for slow leaks; check under the sink and behind the washing machine. Look up at ceilings for new stains, and outside at gutters, which on mature Teesside streets are usually holding a hedge by autumn. Confirm your compliance diary while you are there: gas safety certificate date, EICR validity, smoke and CO alarms present and beeping. Fixing these mid-tenancy costs more and annoys tenants. Fixing them now is routine.
Three of those checks are statutory rather than sensible. The gas safety check runs at intervals of no more than 12 months under the 1998 regulations. The electrical report runs at no more than five years under the 2020 regulations, explained here. And the property has to be fit to live in throughout the tenancy under the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act 2018, which is where damp and mould stop being a decorating question.
The order to run the trades in
The order matters more than the speed. Decorating before the repairs means decorating twice, and flooring before either means the new floor gets walked over by everybody who comes after. This is the sequence we work to on a void, and it is the same sequence whether one firm is doing all of it or you are booking the trades yourself.
| Stage | What happens | Why it sits here |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Inspect and test | Leak check, compliance dates, alarms, anything the check-out report flagged | Everything after this is planned around what it turns up |
| 2. Repairs and first fix | Plumbing, electrical and joinery work, anything that opens a wall or a floor | Doing it later means making good twice |
| 3. Wet rooms | Silicone, grout, seals, extractor fan | Wet and messy, so it happens before the paint |
| 4. Decorating | Fill, touch up or repaint, halls and high-traffic walls first | Covers the making good from the two stages above |
| 5. Flooring | Repair or replace only what is damaged, then a professional clean | Late, so nothing gets dropped on it or walked over |
| 6. Clean and photograph | Full clean, then the listing photographs | The property is only in this condition once |
Second: the wet rooms
Bathrooms and kitchens decide whether a viewing converts. Re-doing tired silicone and bleaching or replacing grout is cheap and transforms how clean a bathroom reads. Check the extractor fan actually extracts. Half the "mould problems" we see in Teesside rentals are just dead fans.
Silicone is the cheapest item on this whole list and the one viewers notice first. Grout that has gone grey reads as dirt whatever the inventory says, and a shower corner with black in it will lose you a let that a dated kitchen would not. If the fan is not clearing the mirror within a couple of minutes it is not working, and the mould comes back whatever you scrub off. If the bathroom is genuinely past it, a landlord-spec refit is often recovered in rent and reduced call-outs, and our bathroom team works these to a tight between-tenancy schedule.
A void week is also the cheapest time to fix extraction, which is where most between-tenancy mould starts: the rate comes from Approved Document F, and the response to a mould report is judged against the government's damp and mould guidance rather than against how the room looks after a coat.
Third: paint, floors and light
Neutral, durable and bright wins. Scrubbable matt in hallways, one colour scheme through the property so future touch-ups are trivial, and the cheapest upgrade in the book: matching lightbulbs that all work, in warm white. Flooring only where it is damaged, because a professional carpet clean usually beats replacement.
One colour through the whole property is worth more than a well-chosen colour in each room. It turns every future touch-up into a five minute job with a tin you already have, rather than a matching exercise nobody wins. Bulbs work the same way. A property where every fitting holds the same warm white bulb photographs better and shows better, and it costs less than the cleaning does.
The batching trick
The most expensive way to do this list is six separate tradesmen on six separate days. The cheapest is one multi-trade visit doing the plumbing checks, seals, repairs and decorating in a single scheduled block, which is exactly the shape of our property maintenance service. Send us your check-out report and we will quote the turnaround as one fixed job.
The saving is not really in the labour. It is in the trips. Every visit carries a fixed cost before anybody picks up a tool, and six visits carry that cost six times over a list one visit could have cleared. It is also why the most useful message you can send is the whole list, including the items you were not going to bother mentioning.
