A new partnership has launched, designed to offer a helping hand to the very smallest agencies by taking repair problems completely away from them.

ARPM Outsourced Lettings Support has joined forces with Fixflo to offer the online repair reporting system as part of ARPM’s ‘ full partnership’ offering.

ARPM says this will give small agents a comprehensive management toolkit usually reserved for bigger agents.

The new service is open to estate agents with fewer than 30 managed rental properties.

Simon Duce, managing director at ARPM, said: “We know that agents want to spend time growing their managed portfolios as that’s where the best returns lie, but wasting time dealing with broken boilers, tracking down available plumbers and scheduling works with tenants takes staff away from frontline duties.

“By working with Fixflo, we’re taking 100% of property maintenance and management stress away from agents.

“Fixflo has efficiency at heart, like all of the property management serviced we offer. By combining our areas of specialism, we are offering small agents an end-to-end property management service with just one point-of-contact and minimum fuss.”

Rajeev Nayyar, director at Fixflo, said: “Fixflo and ARPM work on the same premise of saving letting agents time, so it was a natural partnership.

“Through my discussions with Simon, we realised that staff at smaller agencies aren’t always able to offer tenants and landlords the type of touch technology that they are now expecting.”

Tenants with access to Fixflo simply visit the agent’s website, locate the pictorial-based reporting system embedded in the site and tap the icons to identify the problem before pressing ‘send’ to submit the report.

At this stage the ARPM outsourcing service kicks in, with the report going straight to ARPM’s property management team. Its members will handle every aspect of the repair, from determining whether the problem is an emergency and finding a suitable tradesperson, to booking the repair with the tenant and billing the agent.