The agent walks a block of twelve apartments and issues a list. Your site manager has already been through it once, so a fair proportion of what comes back is arguable rather than obvious. It does not matter much either way. Practical completion is not certified until that list is closed, and half your retention sits behind the certificate.
Someone then works down the list item by item, deciding which subcontract package each one falls under and who currently holds that package on that block. Emails go out, one subcontractor at a time. It is careful work, it is entirely manual, and the certificate waits on it.
Why this is about to get busier
On 25 August, Homes England confirmed 33 strategic partners for the Social and Affordable Homes Programme, sharing £9.58bn in the first wave to deliver 73,600 homes outside London. Eleven partners secured the maximum £350m allocation, including Orbit Group, Clarion, Stonewater and Vistry Homes. Cambridge City Council, Eastleigh Borough Council and Newcastle City Council became the first councils ever granted strategic partner status.
Many of those homes will be built under contract rather than by the organisation holding the grant. The programme runs to 2036, with partners reviewed annually against their delivery plans, so it is a substantial and reasonably durable pipeline. It also comes with a particular sort of client. A registered provider does not move on after completion. They hold the home, the tenancy and the repair obligation for decades, and they will be judged on response times long after your rectification period has closed.
The bit that does not scale
Then the rectification period runs, usually twelve months, and the work changes character. Defects come in through the client or their residents rather than a buyer you have a direct line to. Your customer care coordinator logs each one, works out which package it sits under, books the subcontractor, chases the visit, closes the record and raises the contra charge if the subcontractor does not attend.
By that stage the mix has usually moved on. The package holder who did the second fix may not be on your books. The site manager who knew who covered which block is running a different job. The volume is lower than at completion but the coordination is harder, because the knowledge left with the people.
What gives is not willingness to fix things. It is the speed and accuracy of getting the right subcontractor to the right plot. A wrong allocation costs a visit and buys a delay, and before certification a delay is a completion date and a retention release.
What good allocation looks like
The fix is unglamorous. When a defect is raised, the record already knows which development the plot sits on, which subcontractor holds that package there, and what has already been raised against that property. Allocation becomes a lookup rather than something worked out from memory.
That is what Auto-Assign does in Ubrix. Each snag and each defect routes to the correct contractor for that development, plot and trade, without anyone retyping it from a PDF into a spreadsheet and then into an email. Coordinators confirm allocations rather than working them out, so their time goes on the exceptions that need a decision. Allocation and closure are recorded against the plot, so when the client asks what happened on plot 41, or when a contra charge is disputed, the answer already exists.
Where to start
If you are building for one of the 33, or expect to be, it is worth knowing whether your allocation process holds when completions cluster, and whether it still holds twelve months later when packages have changed hands. If you would like to see how Ubrix handles it, book a short demo and we will walk through your current process first.