The York student let handover: your electrical checklist for the empty weeks

If you let to students in York, you get one properly usable window a year. Tenants out, tenants in, and a gap in between that is always shorter than anybody planned for. Everything on this page is ordered by how badly it goes if you leave it, not by how much it costs.

The window is the whole job

The reason the changeover matters so much is access. For most of the year a student house has six adults, six timetables and six doors that are shut. Isolating a circuit means finding an hour when nobody needs the internet, the shower or the oven, and there is rarely such an hour. Get into the property empty and you can turn the supply off, work through the whole installation, test it properly and put it back together without negotiating with anyone.

The other thing about the York calendar is that it is the same calendar for everybody. Almost every changeover in the city lands in the same handful of weeks, which means every landlord wants the same trades in the same fortnight. Book against your handover date as soon as you know it. Waiting until the house is actually empty is waiting until the diary has gone.

Do these while it is empty, in this order

The order matters more than the list. If the window closes early on you, you want the top of this list done and the bottom of it outstanding, rather than the other way round.

1. Get the EICR done if it is due, or falls due during the tenancy

Not because it is nearly due. Because getting back into an occupied student house in February to isolate circuits one at a time is a conversation you do not want to have. If the report on file runs out at any point while the new tenancy is running, do it now, while the house is yours. An EICR in York covers what the inspection involves and what you get at the end of it.

2. Act on anything the last report coded

If last year's report listed a C1 or a C2 and it is still sitting there, that is this week's work, not next summer's. It is also the easiest possible moment to deal with it, because the house is empty and the electrician is already on site for the retest. What the EICR codes mean goes through the classifications one at a time if you want the detail.

3. Test every smoke and heat alarm, and replace anything past its date

Alarms carry an end-of-life date on the body of the unit. Check it, because a unit that looks fine and chirps when you press the button can still be past the point where the manufacturer will stand behind it.

Then look at whether any of them have been taken down, covered over, or had the battery pulled out. In a shared house it happens, and it is usually because one of them sits too close to a kitchen and nuisance-tripped at an unsociable hour. That is a siting problem with a fix, not a reason to live with a gap in the detection. Smoke and CO alarms.

4. Check the fire detection still matches your paperwork

Walk the house with the licence documents and the last certificate in your hand, and compare what is on the ceiling with what is on the page. Detectors get taken down during a refurb, swapped for a different type, or added to by somebody who was in doing something else. If what is fitted no longer matches what was signed off, the empty weeks are when that gets put right rather than found out. HMO electrical requirements and fire detection systems.

5. Count the sockets, honestly

This is the one landlords skip, and it is the one that ends up mattering. A bedroom in a shared house can easily be running a laptop, a monitor, a phone, a games console, a fan in September and a heater in January. If the room has two sockets, you are not going to stop anyone using an extension lead. You are only going to decide what kind of extension lead it is: the one you had fitted properly, or the four-way from the supermarket that ends up under a duvet.

Adding sockets while the house is empty is a contained, straightforward job. Adding them in November, around six people's timetables, is neither.

6. Look at the consumer unit

Open it up and see how the protection is arranged. Where one device covers a whole group of circuits, a single ordinary fault takes all of them out together. In a six-bedroom house that means several people with no power at eleven at night and a phone call for you, over something that was never dangerous in the first place. Where every circuit has its own device, one circuit goes off and the tenant can usually tell you which one. Consumer unit upgrades in York.

7. Outside lighting and the back yard

Dark alley, unfamiliar house, first term away from home. Security and access lighting is a small piece of work that changes how a property feels to live in, and it is far easier to run a cable across a yard when there is nothing in the yard. Outdoor electrical work.

8. Go through anything you supply

If the property is furnished and the appliances came with it, they are yours to look after. Doing them while the house is empty means everything is accessible and nobody is waiting on their kettle. Appliance testing, and it is worth batching across properties into one visit.

The paperwork side, and the three deadlines

Whatever gets done, the certificates need to end up in the tenants' hands rather than in your filing. There are three separate deadlines here, and they are not the same deadline, which is where most of the confusion comes from.

• Tenants already in the property. Existing tenants must get a copy of the report within 28 days of the inspection.
• Tenants moving in. A new tenant has to be given the most recent report before they take occupation, so for a student let that means before the keys change hands, not in the first week of term.
• Someone considering the property. If someone who is thinking of taking the property asks for the report in writing, you have 28 days to give them a copy.

The middle one is the one that catches people out on a student changeover, because there is no day count attached to it. A lot of landlords carry the 28 days across in their head and assume it covers a move-in as well. It does not. The report goes with the keys.

In practice that means the inspection wants to sit early enough in the window that any remedial work, and the paperwork that follows it, is finished and in hand before handover day rather than on it. If you would rather not track the date yourself, I can hold the renewal date and prompt you, and the wider picture of what a rented property needs is on the York landlord hub.

If a letting agent is involved

Agree who is booking what, in writing, before the window opens. The thing that catches landlords out is almost never forgetting. It is a landlord and an agent each assuming the other had it in hand, discovered on the Friday the keys are due.

A short email listing each item, who owns it and what date it needs to be done by is enough. Send it before the outgoing tenants leave, not after. Working with your letting agent goes into how to split the responsibilities so nothing sits in the gap between you.

For the incoming tenants

If you are the one moving in rather than the one letting it out, there are a few things worth doing in your first week, and none of them ask you to touch anything.

• Find the alarms and press the test buttons. You should hear each one. If a unit is missing from a ceiling, or one of them is silent, report it straight away rather than living with it.
• Find the consumer unit. Know where it is and how to get to it before you need it in the dark. If it is behind a locked cupboard or stacked furniture, ask for that to be sorted.
• Count the sockets in your room. If there are not enough for the way you actually live, say so early. It is a much easier conversation in October than a repair conversation in February.
• Ask for the report. The electrical installation condition report for the property is yours to see, and a landlord who has had the work done properly will be glad to send it over.
• Do not build an adaptor stack. One extension lead, unwound, not under a rug and not behind a bed, is a very different thing from three cheap adaptors plugged into each other.

If something in the house looks wrong, scorching around a socket, a switch that is warm to the touch, a smell of hot plastic, stop using that circuit and report it the same day. It is not being fussy, and it is not your bill.

If you have more than one house

Group them. If your properties are close together and the access is arranged in advance, running them as one batch keeps the day tight and keeps the paperwork moving together instead of trickling in over a month. It also means one conversation about what was found across the portfolio rather than six separate ones.

If you are a member of the York Residential Landlords Association, say so when you get in touch. And most of what is on this page applies to any void period, not only a student changeover, so if your tenancies do not run to the university year there is a general version in the between-tenants electrical checklist.