Your building has a memory problem

A box of keys

About eighteen months after a block of flats in Croydon changed managing agent, a box turned up. Inside were dozens of keys, most of them unlabelled. Every one opened something, and somebody once knew what. Nobody did any more. And by then, the locks that mattered had already been changed, because nobody could find their keys. Leaseholders paid for that.

That box sums up a problem affecting millions of people. England has an estimated 4.9 million leasehold homes, and many are in blocks run by a managing agent. When the agent changes, the paperwork usually moves across. What rarely moves is the understanding: why the roof was patched rather than replaced, which contractor was let go and why, which problem keeps coming back.

Much of that lives in the old agent’s email, and email is almost never handed over. So the new team starts again, and leaseholders, through their service charges, pay for the building to be relearned.

What gets lost

At one building, residents had taken over the running of their block amid worries about fast-rising service charges. When the old agent’s records finally arrived, piecing them together showed duplicate bills, costs that belonged to other properties, repairs to individual flats charged to everyone, and money sitting as credit with suppliers. The building had gone through about six property managers in ten years. The information existed. Nobody had joined it up.

At a taller building, the previous agent handed over several gigabytes of files, including nearly 1,000 photos with no useful descriptions. Buried in them was a fire risk appraisal of the outside walls, two years old, which had found that under PAS 9980, the national standard for assessing them, the walls did not meet the threshold for remediation. Meanwhile, the building was going through a publicly funded remediation process. The report had travelled; what it meant had not.

At a third, about £25,000 of leaseholders’ reserve funds had still not been transferred when the outgoing agent’s appointment ended.

Why it keeps happening

Most managing agents give each building a dedicated property manager. A good one gets to know everything: which lift breaks down, which bit of roof leaks in heavy rain, why a quote was turned down. That works well, until they go on holiday, fall ill or leave. Then the building’s memory leaves with them.

The rest of the knowledge is scattered. Accounts sit in one system, repairs in another, and the decisions in someone’s inbox. The finance team may know £18,000 has gone on a lift over three years, and the repairs team that the same part keeps failing, yet next year’s budget still includes another repair, because nobody put the two together.

And when a whole agency is replaced, the outgoing firm has little reason to make its successor’s job easy. The law gives residents who take over management of their block rights to certain records and funds, and industry guidance says most documents belong to the client. But no rule can hand over reasoning that was never written down.

The fix: the building should remember

Imagine a lift that has had the same fault three times. In 2022 the directors thought about replacing it but put it off, because other major works were already under way. A new manager who sees only the latest engineer’s report will probably approve yet another repair. One who can see the history knows the replacement was postponed, not ruled out, and that the reason for waiting may no longer apply. Same lift, better decision.

The paper’s central idea is simple: knowledge should belong to the building, not to whoever happens to be managing it. That means:

• keeping repairs, bills, reports, complaints and decisions together, attached to the building and its equipment;
• recording where each fact came from, so a passing remark is not mistaken for an engineer’s report;
• writing down why big decisions were made, not just what was decided; and
• passing the whole record on, in a usable form, whenever management changes.

Not everything can be written down. Relationships and judgement stay with people. But much more can be kept than is kept today.

The government has already accepted this for safety. Since Grenfell, key safety information about taller residential buildings must be kept up to date and passed on to future owners, known as the Golden Thread. The paper argues the same common sense should apply to the rest of every building’s history.

Where this comes from

This article summarises a working paper by Saif Bonar, founder of BlockGenie, a managing agent being built around the idea that knowledge should belong to the building. BlockGenie is testing its own system now and will measure whether it actually helps; the paper is open about the fact that the answer is not yet known.

Read the full paper: The Property Management Industry Has a Memory Problem (2026), also available on Zenodo.