Block management admin: where leasehold reform adds to your week

You manage the buildings. The week, meanwhile, fills up with everything that keeps a portfolio running underneath that: setting service-charge budgets and getting demands out correctly, coordinating contractors when something breaks, answering the leaseholder query that needs a considered reply rather than a template, and keeping Section 20 consultations and building compliance on track.

None of it is optional, and none of it is going away. If anything, it is getting heavier. The Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 received royal assent in May 2024, and its service-charge measures are being brought in through secondary legislation - a standardised, more detailed format for service-charge demands and annual accounts, and a duty to disclose any commission taken on a building's insurance. The exact detail is still being finalised by government, but the direction is clear: leaseholders get more information, on a schedule they can hold you to, and managing agents have to produce it in a form they cannot simply improvise. For a portfolio already stretched across budgeting, correspondence and compliance, that is more paperwork landing on the same desk, not less.

You already know AI could take some of this off your team. The question is where, in what order, and what has to stay with a person regardless - because a mis-apportioned service charge or a botched Section 20 consultation is a costly error, not a minor one. This is what we look at when we sit down with a managing agent for our AI workflow assessment for block management, and roughly what we find.

Where the hours actually go

Every portfolio is different - a handful of large blocks with an on-site team loses time in a different shape to a spread of small freeholds managed remotely - but four drains show up consistently. These are illustrative ranges from what we typically see across UK managing agents, not a single sector benchmark; your own numbers are what the assessment is built to find.

Service-charge budgeting and demands. Building the annual budget for each block, apportioning it correctly against the lease, and getting demands out on time and to the letter of the lease terms is a recurring cycle, not a one-off task. Across a portfolio of 15 to 20 blocks, we typically see 4 to 8 hours a week going into budgeting and billing admin year-round - and that can swallow entire days during the annual budget-setting window, before the new reporting format under the 2024 Act adds its own layer on top.

Leaseholder correspondence. The "what does my service charge actually pay for?" email, the consent request, the same question arriving from a dozen leaseholders in slightly different words. It is high-volume, and each reply genuinely needs a considered answer rather than a copy-paste one. We commonly see 5 to 9 hours a week going into this correspondence across a busy portfolio. If this pattern sounds familiar, our piece on handling a high volume of tenant enquiries without burning out covers the same underlying problem from the letting-agent side, and the same principles carry across.

Section 20 consultations and major works. The notices, the statutory timelines, the leaseholder observations, the contractor estimates - a process where a missed step under the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 is a genuinely costly mistake. A single qualifying-works consultation can add 8 to 12 hours over the notice period alone, layered on top of everything else already running that week.

Compliance and safety-certificate tracking. Fire risk assessments, EICRs, lift and asbestos records, and - for higher-risk buildings - the "golden thread" of digital safety information the Building Safety Act 2022 requires you to keep current and accessible. Chasing renewal dates and logging evidence typically costs a further 3 to 5 hours a week, more if the tracking still lives across spreadsheets and email rather than one place.

Add those up and it is easy to see how a property manager's capacity to hold more blocks gets capped by admin rather than by judgement, and why growing the portfolio usually means hiring another manager rather than freeing up the ones you already have.

What's genuinely safe to automate - and what isn't

This is the question that actually matters for a managing agent, and it deserves a precise answer rather than a general one about "AI in property management."

Safe to hand to AI, with a person reviewing the output:

• Drafting service-charge demand cover letters and explanatory notes in the clearer, more detailed format the 2024 Act is pushing towards, so a manager checks and sends rather than writes from scratch.
• Drafting first-pass replies to the leaseholder questions you answer most often, referencing the specific lease clause and the latest accounts.
• Summarising contractor quotes into a clean comparison ready for a Section 20 notice or a leaseholder consultation pack.
• Chasing and logging compliance certificate renewal dates, and keeping the evidence trail organised ahead of when it is needed.

Not safe to hand over, full stop:

• The final decision on service-charge apportionment, or any dispute over it.
• Whether a Section 20 consultation has been validly run and the cost thresholds correctly applied - that judgement, and the liability behind it, stays with the managing agent.
• Any safety-critical call on a fire risk assessment or a building's risk category.
• Anything heading toward a First-tier Tribunal or a formal leaseholder dispute.
• Confirming what insurance commission has actually been disclosed - that is a compliance judgement, not a drafting task.

The system you already run matters here too. Whether that is Qube, MRI, Dwelly or something smaller, it should stay exactly where it is as the system of record. The admin worth fixing is almost always what still happens by hand around it - the drafting, the chasing, the reconciling the system was never built to do for you. And whatever tool does that drafting needs to be on a business-account plan that keeps leaseholder and freeholder data private and does not train on it - that is one of the first things the assessment checks before recommending anything.

One worked example: leaseholder correspondence, before and after

Take the "what does my service charge cover this year?" query - one of the most common questions a managing agent fields, and one that genuinely deserves a proper answer rather than a stock one.

Written from scratch, checking the lease clause and the latest accounts before drafting a considered reply typically takes a property manager 10 to 12 minutes. Across a dozen similar queries a week, that is around two hours gone on essentially the same answer, worded slightly differently each time.

With an AI-drafted reply pulled from a prompt library that already references the relevant lease clause and the current accounts, the same query becomes a 2 to 3 minute job: the manager checks the draft is accurate for this leaseholder and sends it. Same answer, same care, same person accountable for what goes out - the difference is roughly 8 minutes per query that no longer goes into re-explaining something the lease already sets out clearly.

Multiply that across a portfolio fielding leaseholder queries every day, and it starts to add up to a meaningful chunk of a property manager's week.

Find your own number

We do not publish a single "block managers save X hours" headline, because your portfolio decides the number - a concentrated set of large blocks loses time differently to a spread of small freeholds managed remotely. What we can say is that service-charge budgeting, leaseholder correspondence, Section 20 admin and compliance tracking are the four places worth checking first, in roughly that order for most agents.

The way to find out what that looks like for your business specifically is to measure your own week rather than guess at an average. Our free admin cost calculator gives you a rough starting figure in a couple of minutes. The 60-minute AI workflow assessment goes a lot further: we map where the hours actually go across your property managers and back office, then hand back a report built around your portfolio - named tools, the compliance-safe line between draft and decision, and a prioritised plan.

See where your hours are going with the full assessment, or start with our free HoursBack quiz if you want a quick first read before you commit to anything.