A Repeat-Caller Sheet for Landlords and Agents With Several Properties

Some of your best customers are the ones who ring most often: letting agents and landlords with a handful of properties each. They are also the ones most likely to get tired of explaining the same things. Who lets you in? Who approves the quote? Which flat is the one with the awkward stairwell?

A repeat-caller sheet fixes that. It is a short record, kept per agent or landlord, that holds the details that rarely change. On each new call you only need to capture what is new: the fault and how urgent it is.

What a repeat-caller sheet is (and isn't)

The sheet is not a full customer database, and it is not a replacement for the details you take on each job. Think of it as two layers:

• Standing details. Facts about the caller and their properties that stay the same from call to call.
• Job details. The fault, the urgency and the access arrangements for this visit, taken fresh every time.

Keeping the layers separate stops old information being treated as current. A tenant who was in last month may have moved out.

What to put on the sheet

Keep it to one page, or one screen. Useful fields for each agent or landlord:

• Name, company and best contact number. Add a second number if there is a office line and a mobile.
• Preferred contact method. Phone, text or email, and any times to avoid.
• Who approves work. The caller, the landlord behind them, or a named person who signs off quotes. Note any limit above which you must check first, if they have told you one.
• Their job or property reference format. If they use references, note what they look like so your paperwork matches their system.
• Billing details. Who receives the invoice and where it goes.
• Property list. Full address and postcode for each property, with a short note such as "flat above shop, entrance round the back".
• Usual access route. Key-holder, lockbox, or "always contact the tenant first". Mark this as a default to confirm, not a fact to rely on.

Keep the property notes short

For each property, add only things that save time on the doorstep: parking, awkward access, where the stopcock or consumer unit was last found, and whether the agent has asked you to avoid certain hours. If a note would take more than a line to explain, put it in the job history instead.

Date your notes when you add them. A note with no date is hard to trust a year later.

Use it during the call

When a known caller rings, pull up their sheet before you ask anything. Then say what you already have: "I've got you down for the flat on the high street and the two houses on the same road. Which one is this about?" The caller hears that you remember them, and you skip a lot of questions.

Then confirm only the parts that go stale:

1. Is the property the same one on the sheet?
2. What is the fault, in one line?
3. Is anyone without heating, hot water or a working toilet, or is there water escaping?
4. Who is getting us in this time, and is the tenant expecting us?
5. Does anyone need to approve a quote first?

If the caller lists several properties, take them one at a time, most urgent first. The idea of using a fixed order of questions so a short call still produces a complete record is covered in more depth in this guide to capturing property details when agents ring about several properties. The sheet works well alongside that, because the standing details are already filled in.

Read back and update

At the end of the call, read back what you have logged for each property. While you do, notice whether anything on the sheet has changed: a new key-holder, a different approver, a property added or sold. Update the sheet straight away, not "later". Later rarely happens.

Keep it maintained

A sheet nobody trusts is worse than none. A few habits help:

• One owner. Pick one person to tidy the sheets, even if everyone can add to them.
• Shared location. Keep them in one shared place, not on someone's own phone or notepad.
• A quick review after each job. If the engineer found that the access details were wrong, the sheet gets corrected before the job is closed.
• Privacy. These sheets hold names, numbers and addresses, including tenants'. Store them securely, share them only with people who need them, and ask your usual adviser if you are unsure of your obligations.

Start small

You don't need every agent on file by Friday. Make a sheet for the next three repeat callers who ring, fill in what you learn, and see how the calls change. Once your team sees how much quicker a known caller is, the rest of the sheets tend to get written on their own.