Paul Oxley, Founder of Visionbase Software, explores why the audit trail is becoming just as important as the repair itself.
Housing providers have never faced this much scrutiny over what happens after a repair is reported. Response times, resident communication, and property condition are all now expected to be demonstrable, not assumed. Completing the repair used to be the whole story. Increasingly, it’s only the first half. The second half is proof: can you show what happened, when it happened, and what was done about it?
Small portfolios may be able to keep on top of all their auditing, but across 500 or 5,000 properties, some repairs will always end up disputed, delayed or escalated. That’s simply volume. What matters is whether your organisation can produce a clear, timestamped account of each one on demand, or if you have to reconstruct it afterwards from inboxes, spreadsheets and memory?
Multiplied across a portfolio, that gap stops being an occasional inconvenience and becomes a structural exposure. Exposure to legal costs, regulatory findings and reputational damage, all surfacing exactly when scrutiny is highest.
That exposure isn’t theoretical. The Housing Ombudsman’s 2025 Spotlight Report on repairs and maintenance found investigations rose 474% between 2019/20 and 2024/25. In 2024/25 alone, it made 6,380 findings against landlords. That’s an average of 25 every working day. This isn’t one organisation’s failure. It’s a pattern across the sector, in the regulator’s own casework.
The recurring theme in the Ombudsman’s decisions is that when evidence is disputed, and there’s no audit trail, it may not be possible to establish whether an action took place or whether the landlord followed its own policy. That’s not a newly invented standard. It’s the standard the regulator is already applying, case after case. As scrutiny tightens, landlords are failing to meet it more often, not less: the maladministration rate for repairs complaints reached 73% in 2023/24, up from 37% in 2019/20. When the regulator’s findings are at their most serious, repairs are where they concentrate; around three-quarters of all severe maladministration findings in 2024/25 involved repairs and maintenance.
That 474% rise began before residents had an easy way to submit a written complaint with the right legal details attached. AI tools can now explain a resident’s legal position, cite the relevant housing legislation, and draft a formal letter of claim in minutes, before a solicitor has even got involved. Layered onto a trend already moving in one direction, it’s hard to imagine the number falling.
The obvious pushback is that most dissatisfied residents don’t escalate that far. Most issues are still resolved informally, long before a claim is drafted. That’s broadly true. But it assumes escalation depends on the resident overcoming inertia. Increasingly, the barrier is being reduced for them by tools that do the work of building a case and by claims firms actively looking for cases to build.
Housemark’s June 2026 Monthly Pulse survey shows landlords understand the direction of travel: 80% say they’ve invested in the skills and capacity to deliver Awaab’s Law Phase 2. But only 57% agree that their IT systems effectively collect and report the information they require. That’s exactly where the information problem bites. The details of a single repair typically live in several places: a phone call, an email, a photo, a note in a CRM. Each is handled correctly but scattered without a central thread. Ask who was told what, when the contractor was instructed, or what confirmed completion, and most organisations have to reconstruct the story rather than produce it. That matters: a record already in hand means there is rarely anything left to escalate. Most disputes that turn into formal claims are the ones nobody could answer quickly enough.
The problem is clear, and that’s why My Repairs Online (MYRO) was developed. MYRO brings the repair journey into a single property-linked record. The report, instruction, approval, communication, and completion are built automatically as the work progresses rather than assembled afterwards under pressure.
The question worth asking is simple: if a repair were challenged tomorrow, could your team show exactly how it was dealt with? If the answer involves searching emails, spreadsheets and separate systems, then there is likely to be a gap. That’s the gap MYRO is built to close. It’s not just about managing repairs. It’s about proving you managed them properly.
It’s not just about managing repairs.
It’s about proving you managed them properly.
Want a quick read on how exposed your own records are? Take MYRO’s free Repairs & Compliance Health Check. A two-minute assessment that flags your biggest exposure.