What roof work do HMOs and student lets in Bath need?

Why shared houses need a different approach

A family home has someone looking at the ceilings every day. A shared house often has several tenants, each of whom assumes that someone else will report a stain. Students may be away for weeks, and a leak that starts in a quiet period can run unseen.

The roofs themselves are often the same as any other in Bath: slate or clay on older terraces, flat roofs on rear extensions, and lead in the gutters, valleys and flashings. What differs is the use. A loft room added to fit another tenant puts a bedroom directly under the roof slope, so a leak is no longer harmless water on a loft floor. It is a damp bedroom with a person in it.

Extra bathrooms and kitchens in a shared house also produce more moisture. Poor ventilation in the loft can make condensation worse, and that can be mistaken for a leak. A roofer who looks at the whole roof space can tell the two apart, which saves paying for a repair that does not cure the problem.

The landlord also has to think about the people involved. A tenant who finds water coming through a ceiling needs it dealt with quickly, and the landlord who has a roofer ready to look is in a stronger position than one who has to start looking after the call.

The priorities, in order

The most useful way to plan is to put the jobs in order of the damage they prevent.

1. Active leaks. Water entering a habitable room comes first. Leaks get priority from us, while the proper repair follows once the roof has been made watertight for now.
2. Lead and flashings. Lead flashing at every wall and stack needs checking. Lead in a parapet gutter, the channel running behind the low wall along a roof edge, is the most common source of leaks on terraced houses. These are hidden from the street and easy to forget.
3. Gutters and downpipes. A blocked or leaking gutter soaks the wall and the eaves. In a shared house with nobody responsible for it, this is often neglected.
4. Loose or slipped slates and tiles. Small gaps let water reach the battens, which are the timber strips carrying the slates, and rot spreads from there.
5. Chimneys. Pointing, flaunching (the mortar bed the pots sit in) and the lead around the stack all need checking, especially on disused stacks nobody pays attention to.
6. Flat roofs. Rear extensions and dormers often have a flat roof that fails without warning.

A survey with photographs gives you a ranked list of these, so you can budget across the year.

Timing work around tenancies

In a student market the tenancy calendar is predictable, and that helps. The gap between one academic year and the next is the natural window for work that needs access to rooms, scaffold at the windows, or several days of noise.

Plan the larger jobs early. Roofers, scaffold and materials all take time to arrange, and the summer gap is short. A survey in spring leaves time to agree the work, order materials and book the dates before the house empties. Leaving it until the tenants have gone makes the schedule tighter than it needs to be.

Smaller repairs cannot wait for a gap. A leak is dealt with when it happens. Where access is needed inside, give tenants notice and agree a time. Work that needs only the roof and scaffold, such as re-leading a gutter or replacing slipped slates, can often proceed without entering the house at all.

Winter is the hardest time to find a window. If a repair is known to be needed but the roof is not leaking, it is usually better to do it in drier weather than to carry on into the next winter. Our note on how long roofs last gives a sense of when materials are nearing the end of their life.

Planning and consent in Bath

Bath adds a layer of rules that landlords should know about before they instruct work. Bath is a UNESCO World Heritage Site throughout, and its conservation area covers about half the city. Many houses used as HMOs are in listed terraces or in conservation areas.

Work that would affect the character of a listed house needs listed building consent, and B&NES Council deals with it. Planning permission is a different application. Ring the council before booking anything, because the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 makes unauthorised work of that kind a criminal offence. Some streets also fall under Article 4 directions, which the council can check for your address.

Re-covering a roof can bring Building Regulations into play. Approval is normally not required where the work affects less than 25 per cent of the building envelope and less than 50 per cent of the roof. Beyond them, approval is needed and better insulation may be required. We deal with building control for you where it applies.

HMO licensing and fire safety are separate matters, covered by the council and your own advisers. We keep to the roof and recommend you check the rest with B&NES.

Matching the existing material matters on these houses. A natural slate roof stays natural slate, and stone tiles stay stone, which keeps the street looking right and the consent route simpler.

Keeping costs under control across several properties

A landlord with several houses can treat roof care as an annual routine rather than a series of emergencies. A yearly visit to each property, including a look at the lead, the gutters and the chimney, tends to catch problems while they are still small repairs.

A simple maintenance record helps. Note the date of each visit, the photographs, what was done and what is coming next. When it is time to sell, refinance or hand over to a managing agent, that record shows what was done and when. A roof maintenance contract is one way to run a planned programme across a portfolio.

Some products suit rental use better than others. Man-made slate or a single-ply membrane may be worth considering where a natural material is not required by consent. For flat extension roofs, our page on single-ply roofing explains where it suits.

Where a repair would eat up a large share of a new covering, we tell you. Repair is our first choice, and when it stops making sense we explain why and what the alternative involves.

What happens when you book a survey

Shared houses are part of our commercial roofing and landlord work. We visit the property, inspect the roof from outside and, if access is safe, the roof space within, with photographs of your own roof. You receive a written summary that ranks the work, with a fixed price for each item after the survey.

If the house is let and tenants are in residence, we agree access with you or the managing agent, and we can liaise directly with tenants to arrange a time. All waste goes with us when the job ends.

Tell us when the tenancy ends, when the next one starts and which rooms are occupied. Those dates decide the order of work, and we plan around them. Let the tenants know in writing which days we will be on site, and whether anyone needs to be in so we can reach the loft.