Gas Safety Certificate Portfolio — West Hampstead Landlord

Landlord gas safety compliance is one of those obligations that the law makes mandatory and experience makes stressful. The legal requirement is clear: a Gas Safety certificate must be in place for every rented property at all times, renewed annually, served on the tenant before or at the start of each tenancy. The consequences of non-compliance — a category 1 housing offence, potential criminal prosecution, and in the event of a gas-related incident, profound personal liability — are serious enough to concentrate the mind.

The practical reality of managing that compliance across eight properties simultaneously is considerably more complicated than the legislation implies. Eight different addresses across West Hampstead and Hampstead. Eight sets of tenants, each with their own working hours, commitments and varying degrees of enthusiasm for allowing tradespeople into their home. Eight boilers of different makes, ages and service histories. And all of it needing to be completed, documented and delivered within a tight window before three tenancy renewals were due to exchange.

The landlord had always managed this process himself — calling each tenant individually, booking separate appointments with his gas engineer, chasing for confirmation, chasing for certificates, and invariably discovering that two or three properties had minor issues that required a return visit. He'd spent the better part of two weeks doing it the previous year. This year, a colleague recommended RARE.

RARE's approach to portfolio gas safety work is built around a single principle: the landlord should not have to do anything except approve the programme and receive the certificates. Everything else is RARE's responsibility.

From the initial call, RARE's office team took over tenant coordination entirely. Within 48 hours, all eight tenants had been contacted, appointments had been confirmed, and a two-day schedule had been built around the tenants' availability — not the engineer's convenience. The programme was circulated to the landlord in a single document showing each property, the confirmed appointment time, and the attending engineer's name.

Two Gas Safe engineers were deployed across the two days, working through the portfolio in a sequence designed to minimise travel time and maximise the number of same-day inspections. Each visit followed a defined process: full gas appliance inspection, boiler flue gas analysis and combustion testing, visual inspection of all accessible gas pipework and fittings, and a written CP12 certificate generated from site.

Three of the eight properties presented minor issues — two had boilers requiring a thermocouple replacement, one had a gas cooker with a faulty flame failure device. In all three cases, the engineers had the necessary parts on the van and completed the remedial work on the same visit, at no additional charge. The certificates were emailed to both the landlord and each tenant before the engineers left site each evening.

On the evening of day two, the landlord had eight CP12 certificates in his inbox. He told RARE's account manager it was the first time he hadn't spent a weekend chasing outstanding paperwork after the CP12 cycle.