Log every reported fault against the unit, not in a text thread: a title, a description, a type and priority, and up to three photos taken on the spot. Assign a contractor so they get the job in writing. Track it through to completed, with the tenant updated automatically at each step. What you're left with is a dated, photo-backed repair history per property — the thing that answers a local-authority inspector, a deposit dispute and a Form 11 without you reconstructing anything. TenantSync does exactly this on web, iOS and Android, and it's included on the €20 Starter plan. Free 14-day trial, no card required.
Ask any letting agent where their maintenance actually lives and you'll get an honest, uncomfortable answer: some of it in a WhatsApp thread, some in a shared inbox, some in a phone call the negotiator remembers taking, and the invoice in a folder that gets opened in November. Ask a self-managing landlord and the answer is shorter — "the tenant texts me."
That works right up until the moment it has to be proved. And in Irish lettings, the moment it has to be proved always arrives eventually: a deposit deduction the tenant disputes, a local-authority inspection, an RTB claim that the property fell below standard, or simply a landlord client asking what the €480 on last month's statement was for. At that point the question isn't did you fix it. It's can you show what was reported, when, what you did about it, and how fast — and a text thread is a very poor answer to that question.
This is a guide, not legal advice
Landlord repair obligations, minimum-standards enforcement and deposit disputes are fact-specific. This article explains the general position for private residential tenancies in Ireland and how a maintenance record supports it. Confirm your own obligations with the RTB, and take advice on a contested deduction, an improvement notice or a dispute before acting.
Why an unlogged repair is a liability, not just an oversight
There is no rule in Irish law that says "keep a repair log". What the law requires is the outcome — and a log is the only practical way to demonstrate you reached it. Three separate obligations converge on the same record:
- The repair obligation itself. Under the Residential Tenancies Act 2004, a landlord must keep the structure and the interior of a rented home in the condition it was in at the start of the tenancy — normal wear and tear excepted — and carry out repairs. A tenant who has to notify you of a fault and then waits is not merely inconvenienced; where a landlord fails to act within a reasonable time after being told, a tenant can be entitled to be reimbursed for repairs they reasonably had to arrange themselves.
- Minimum standards. The Housing (Standards for Rented Houses) Regulations 2019 set the standard every rented home has to meet — heating, ventilation, sanitary facilities, fire safety including smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, and more. Local authorities inspect against them and can serve improvement notices where a property falls short. A maintenance record is what turns "we look after the property" into something an inspector can read.
- Evidence at the end of the tenancy. Deposit retention is one of the most common disputes the RTB deals with, and it is decided on evidence. If you deduct for damage beyond normal wear and tear, you need to show what the condition was, what happened, what it cost and what was done. A repair logged with photos and a contractor's invoice is that evidence. A repair remembered is not.
The risk isn't that you don't do the repairs. Most landlords and every decent agent do. The risk is that six months later there is nothing on paper that says so — and the burden of proof falls on the person with the record, which is not you.
The two-minute rule that costs the most
The repair that never gets logged is almost always the small one — a dripping tap, a sticking window, an alarm chirping. It gets handled informally and forgotten. Then the tenant moves out, the deposit conversation starts, and the small things turn out to be the ones with no paper trail at all. The habit worth building isn't logging big repairs. It's logging every repair, because logging takes half a minute and reconstructing takes an afternoon.
The 30-second log: what actually goes into a repair record
A repair record only has to capture the things you can't reliably remember later. In TenantSync that's a short form you can complete standing in the hall of the property:
| Field | Why it's there |
|---|---|
| Property | The request is logged against a specific unit, so it joins that property's history rather than floating in an inbox. This is the single most important field — it's what turns individual jobs into a per-property record. |
| Title & description | What was reported, in the reporter's terms. Short title for the list view, description for the detail that matters to a contractor. |
| Type | Electrical, plumbing, HVAC, cooling, security, carpentry or general — so you can see at a glance what a property keeps needing, and route it to the right trade. |
| Priority | Low, medium, high or urgent. Priority is what stops a genuinely urgent job — no heat, no hot water, a fire-safety issue — sinking beneath twenty routine ones. |
| Photos (up to 3) | Taken with your phone camera or picked from your gallery, JPG or PNG. This is the part you cannot recreate afterwards. |
| Status | Where the job is: new, scheduled, awaiting contractor, in progress, tenant responded, pending, completed or cancelled. |
Two of those deserve emphasis. Priority is the field that makes a list of forty open requests usable instead of overwhelming — filter to urgent and high and you have your morning. And photos are the field people skip and later wish they hadn't. A photo taken at the moment of report fixes three facts simultaneously — the date, the location and the condition — and every argument you will ever have about a repair turns on one of those three.
Log the next repair from where you're standing
Start a free 14-day trial and log a maintenance request against the unit with photos, assign a contractor, and keep a dated repair history per property — on your phone, at the property, in the time it takes to type a text.
No credit card required · Included on the €20 Starter plan
What happens the moment you hit submit
The reason a repair "gets forgotten" is rarely that someone didn't care. It's that the report and the people who need to know about it live in different places. Logging a request in TenantSync closes that gap automatically:
- The landlord is emailed. Whoever owns the property gets the new request by email — so a tenant-raised or agent-raised job doesn't depend on someone remembering to forward it.
- The tenant gets an acknowledgement. An automatic acknowledgement email goes to the tenants on the tenancy. This is the single cheapest piece of tenant relations there is: most follow-up calls are not "have you fixed it" but "did anyone see my message".
- A push notification lands on the app. The same event reaches the mobile app, so a request raised while you're out doesn't wait for you to open a laptop.
- Every status change emails the tenant. When the request moves — scheduled, in progress, completed — the tenant is emailed the update automatically. Nobody has to remember to keep them posted.
For an agency, that last point is worth more than it looks. The volume of inbound "any update on the boiler?" traffic is a real cost, measured in negotiator hours, and almost all of it is caused by silence rather than by delay. Automatic status emails don't make the boiler get fixed faster. They stop the phone ringing about it.
Assigning a contractor — the brief in writing
A repair job passed to a contractor by phone has a familiar failure mode: they turn up at the wrong unit, or without knowing what the job is, or a week later because it went in a notebook. Assigning a service provider to the request sends them the whole brief by email — the property address, the job title and description, the type, the priority, the status, when it was raised, and your name, email and phone.
That single email removes most of the back-and-forth. It also creates the second half of your evidence trail: not just what was reported, but who was instructed to deal with it and when. If a tenant later argues nothing was done, "the contractor was assigned the same afternoon and here's the job that was sent to them" is a very different conversation to "I'm fairly sure I rang someone."
| Status | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| New | Reported and logged. The clock — legal and reputational — starts here. |
| Scheduled | A time is agreed. This is the status tenants most want to see. |
| Awaiting contractor | Assigned and with the trade — the job is out of your hands but not out of the record. |
| In progress | Work under way. |
| Tenant responded | The ball is back with the tenant — access, availability, more detail needed. |
| Pending | Blocked on something: a part, a quote, a landlord approval. |
| Completed / Cancelled | Closed out, with the dates that closed it recorded against the property. |
Alongside the status there are two different kinds of conversation, deliberately kept apart. Comments are the shared thread — tenant, landlord and agent can all see them, which is where you agree access times and confirm the job is done. Notes are internal: only a landlord or agent can add or read them, so a contractor's quote, a view on whether a cost is the tenant's or the landlord's, or a note about a difficult tenancy stays where it belongs. Mixing those two up in a WhatsApp thread is how awkward messages end up in front of the wrong person.
For agencies: the repair that has to reach the disbursement statement
If you're a letting agent, a repair isn't finished when the contractor leaves. It's finished when the cost has been correctly deducted, the landlord can see why, the contractor has been paid, and the client-money position balances. That's a chain most agencies run across three systems and reconcile by hand at month end.
Where an agency runs rent through TenantSync's Open Banking reconciliation, that chain is one flow:
- Contractor work is recorded against the property as a work item with an amount and a work date, and can be linked to an expense record.
- The agency approves it for deduction — nothing reaches a landlord statement without an explicit approval step.
- It rolls into the landlord's disbursement statement, which shows the rent collected, the management fee retained, the contractor deduction and the net amount paid over — so a landlord asking "what was the €480?" gets the answer from the statement rather than from a phone call.
- Payment is confirmed against bank data. When the agency pays the contractor, the outbound transaction on the collection account is matched back to the work item and marked paid. A work item that never gets matched inside the confirmation window is flagged as payment overdue — which is precisely the failure that quietly damages contractor relationships.
- Every movement is decomposed into client-ledger entries — rent in, fee retained, contractor cost, net disbursement — which is the shape a PSRA client-money file needs to be in.
Maintenance is where lettings admin and client money meet. An agency that logs repairs in one place and reconciles contractor costs in another is doing the same job twice and can still only prove half of it.
Get the maintenance log & repair-response checklist — built into the app
Start a free 14-day trial and TenantSync turns the checklist below into a live workflow: photo-backed requests against each unit, contractors briefed by email, tenants updated automatically, and a repair history per property.
The repair history that protects you — three times over
The individual repair record is useful. The accumulated record per property is what actually pays for itself, and it does so in three separate places.
At deposit return
A deduction for damage beyond normal wear and tear has to be evidenced, not asserted. The strongest version of that evidence is a chain: the move-in condition record showing how the property started, the maintenance log showing what was reported and repaired during the tenancy, and the invoice showing what the end-of-tenancy damage cost to put right. Each link is ordinary; together they answer the question an adjudicator is actually asking. Our guide to deposits, deductions and avoiding a dispute covers the full picture.
At a local-authority inspection
Inspectors assess the property against the 2019 minimum-standards regulations. A property log that shows faults being reported and closed out — with dates and photos — supports the case that the home has been actively maintained, and it makes the visit shorter. TenantSync also stores your BER and compliance certificates per unit with expiry reminders, so the certificate side of an inspection is covered by the same record.
At tax time
Repairs and maintenance are generally an allowable expense against Irish rental income; improvements are capital and are not. The reason landlords lose these deductions isn't that they don't qualify — it's that in November the cost is an unlabelled line on a bank statement with no job attached to it. A repair logged when it happened, with the cost captured against the property, is a deduction that survives to the return. Our guide to tracking every allowable expense — including the €10,000 pre-letting relief — goes through the full list.
Why it has to work on a phone
Every argument above collapses if logging a repair requires a laptop. Repairs are reported at inconvenient moments — at a viewing, on a stairwell, halfway through a check-out — and a record you intend to write up later is a record that gets written up wrong or not at all.
That's why the maintenance workflow is a first-class part of the iOS and Android apps, not a cut-down version of the web one. You can create a request against a property, take the photo with the camera there and then, set priority, filter and sort the open list by status and priority, and open a job to see its detail — the same data as the web platform, because it's the same system. The web app adds the heavier tooling an agency office wants: search across the whole book, date-range filtering, statistics on open, in-progress and completed volumes, and an Excel export when someone asks for a report.
The tenant's side matters as much as yours
Tenants with tenant-portal access can raise a request themselves against the property they lease, attach photos and follow the thread. You get a structured, dated report instead of a text at 11pm, and they get visible progress instead of silence. Tenants see only their own requests, and internal notes stay internal.
The repair-response checklist
Whether you run it in the app or on paper, this is the standing playbook that turns a reported fault into a defensible record:
Repair-response checklist
- Log it against the unit the moment it's reported — never in a text thread or a notebook.
- Photograph it before anything is touched. Dated photos at the point of report are the evidence you can't go back for.
- Set a real priority. Heat, hot water and fire safety are not "medium".
- Acknowledge the tenant. Most chasing is caused by silence, not by delay.
- Assign the contractor in writing — address, description, type, priority, your contact details.
- Keep the two threads separate: comments for the tenant, internal notes for your team.
- Close it out properly. Move it to completed with the date, so the record shows the response time.
- Capture the cost against the property — for the landlord statement, and for the tax return.
General guidance only. Confirm your repair and minimum-standards obligations at rtb.ie.
The same maintenance workflow, agency or single property
The €20 Starter plan (up to 10 units) includes the maintenance request system and the tenant portal alongside RTB compliance and rent tracking. Agencies on the Professional plan get the same workflow across a bigger book, plus PSRA client-money compliance, multi-bank rent reconciliation and landlord disbursement statements. See the Irish landlord's toolkit for how the pieces fit together.
How to get started
- Start your free 14-day trial — no credit card required.
- Download the app on iOS or Android, or use the web platform — it's the same account.
- Add your properties, or import them with concierge help if you're moving off a spreadsheet.
- Add your contractors as service providers, with an email address so assignment briefs reach them.
- Log the next repair in the app instead of the text thread — with photos — and assign it.
- Close it out when it's done, and capture the cost against the property.
Frequently asked questions
Is a landlord in Ireland legally required to keep a record of repairs?
There's no standalone rule saying "you must keep a repair log" — what the law requires is the outcome. Under the Residential Tenancies Act 2004 a landlord must keep the structure and interior of a rented home in the condition it was in at the start of the tenancy, normal wear and tear excepted, and carry out repairs. The Housing (Standards for Rented Houses) Regulations 2019 separately set minimum standards that local authorities inspect and enforce. A repair record is simply how you demonstrate you met those obligations — at an inspection, in a deposit dispute or in an RTB case. Without a dated record you're asking a third party to take your word for it. General guidance, not legal advice; confirm at rtb.ie.
Why do photos matter so much when logging a repair?
Because you can't recreate them later. A photo taken when a fault is reported fixes the date, the location and the condition — the three things every later argument turns on. If a deposit deduction is challenged, what's needed is evidence that damage went beyond normal wear and tear, and photos alongside invoices are exactly that. A photo taken after the repair proves nothing about what was there before. TenantSync lets you attach up to three photos to a request, taken with your phone camera or picked from your gallery.
How does TenantSync handle maintenance requests?
A request is logged against a specific property with a title, description, type (electrical, plumbing, HVAC, cooling, security, carpentry or general), a priority from low to urgent, and up to three photos. Creating it emails the landlord, sends an acknowledgement to the tenant and pushes a notification to the mobile app. You can assign a contractor, who's emailed the full job — address, description, type, priority and your contact details. Status changes email the tenant automatically. Comments are the shared thread; notes are internal to landlords and agents. Same workflow on web, iOS and Android.
Can tenants submit maintenance requests themselves?
Yes. A tenant with tenant-portal access can raise a request against the property they lease, describe it, attach photos and follow it through the comment thread. You get a structured, dated report rather than a text message at 11pm, and the tenant can see the job moving — which is usually what the follow-up call was really about. Tenants see only their own requests, and can't assign contractors or read internal notes.
How do letting agents handle contractor costs and landlord disbursements?
For agencies running rent through TenantSync's Open Banking reconciliation, contractor work is recorded against the property as a work item with an amount and work date, approved by the agency, then rolled into the landlord's disbursement statement — showing rent collected, management fee retained, contractor deduction and the net amount paid over. When the contractor is paid, the outbound transaction on the collection account is matched back to confirm settlement, and an unmatched item is flagged as payment overdue. Every movement is decomposed into client-ledger entries, which is what a PSRA client-money file needs.
Is maintenance included in the €20 Starter plan?
Yes. Starter covers up to 10 units at €20 a month and includes the maintenance request system and the tenant portal, alongside RTB registration and compliance, rent tracking and reconciliation, and digital leases and documents. Agencies on Professional get the same maintenance workflow across a larger book, plus PSRA client-money compliance, multi-bank rent reconciliation and landlord disbursement statements. Every plan starts with a free 14-day trial, no credit card.
Can I claim repair costs against my rental income in Ireland?
Repairs and maintenance are generally allowable against Irish rental income, while improvements are capital and are not. The practical obstacle is evidence — a payment you can't categorise or vouch is a deduction you won't claim. Logging the repair and capturing the contractor's cost against the property through the year means the figure is already there, attached to the job it relates to, when you prepare a Form 11. General guidance, not tax advice; confirm at revenue.ie or with an accountant.