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Admin scorecard for block managers: how many office hours a week could AI prepare for you to check, job by job
Enter the hours a week your firm spends on leaseholder emails, Section 20, compliance dates and arrears to see which jobs AI could prepare for you.
A property manager with a portfolio of blocks is paid to exercise judgement about buildings and leases, and spends most of the day answering email. Leaseholders ask about the roof, the bill, the lift and the neighbour. Behind the inbox sit dated statutory processes where a miscounted day costs real money: skip Section 20 on a £48,000 roof across 24 flats and the recoverable sum falls to £6,000. This scorecard asks how many hours each office job takes in a normal week and shows which a tool could prepare for a manager to check, which stay with the manager, and what the time costs.
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Admin scorecard for a block management firm: the office hours a week that could be prepared by AI and checked by you, job by job
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The jobs it asks about
Six of the eight jobs are drafting and date-keeping from records the firm already holds. A leaseholder reply draws on the lease summary, the account and the repairs log. A Section 20 notice has a fixed form and a 30-day period that starts on the date of the notice, which the Section 20 checker counts. Compliance dates for fire risk assessments, lifts and insurance are a list per block. Arrears letters depend on the stage and on the forfeiture limits. Repairs are an order, a chase and an update. A demand has four statutory tests that the demand validity checker runs before it is posted.
How the score is worked out
There is one assumption and you can change it. For every job a tool prepares, the scorecard keeps a share of the time for a person to read the draft and approve it. We set that at a quarter. So a job that takes four hours a week by hand is counted as three hours handed over and one hour kept. Jobs that stay with a person are counted in full on your side. The yearly figure is the handed-over hours multiplied by the hourly cost and the number of weeks you enter. It is a cost of time. It becomes money only if the hours go on paid work, or a role you were about to fill is not filled.
Where the line sits
Two jobs stay with the property manager. What the lease lets the landlord recover is a reading of the lease, and leases differ block by block; a tool can quote the clause but should not decide the answer. Site inspections and residents' meetings need a person in the building. The statutory processes fall on the drafted side because they are rules with dates. The 18-month rule is the clearest case: a cost incurred more than 18 months before it is demanded is lost for good unless the leaseholder was told in writing in time. Nobody decides to miss that date. It is missed because nobody was counting, and counting is what software is for. Our accounts calendar shows the dates for a March year end.
A worked example
With the example hours left as they are, the scorecard shows 27 hours of office work a week, 21 of them on the six jobs a tool can prepare. Keeping a quarter for checking leaves 15.8 hours a week handed over, 58% of the total. At £15 an hour over 46 weeks that is £10,868 a year. The three largest are leaseholder emails (6 of 8 hours), repairs and contractor chasing (3.8 of 5) and Section 20 notices (1.5 of 2). What stays with a person: deciding what the lease lets you recover, and inspections and meetings, 6 hours. The example hours are ours, chosen to be plausible for a small block management firm; they are not survey figures, and the point of the tool is that you replace them with your own.
The three readiness questions
The hours say what could be handed over. The last three questions say whether it would work in your block management firm this month. First, are the rules written down? A tool follows a page that says what a good reply looks like, what must never be said and when to stop and ask; it cannot follow habits that live in one person's head. Second, does the work arrive in writing? Jobs that come by email, web form or from a system with an export can be drafted from. Jobs that come by phone or on paper have to be typed in first. Third, is there one named person who approves drafts every working day? Without one, drafts queue, and a queue of unapproved drafts is slower than doing the job by hand.
What to do with the result
Start with the job at the top of the list and no other. Write its rules on one page, run it with a person approving every draft for a fortnight, and count how many drafts went out unchanged. If most did, lower the checking share for that job and move to the second. If few did, the rules page is wrong, not the idea.
Overlyft sets up AI assistants for block managers built around drafted jobs like the six above; the work is priced after a fixed-price audit, and you pay the AI provider directly for any subscription. The scorecard works the same whichever tool you buy, or if you buy none and give the top job to a part-time administrator instead. Our comparison of the AI tools sold to block managers sets out what else is on the market and what each costs.
Short answers from this page
Can AI help run a block management office?
With the dated, rule-bound administration: Section 20 timetables, demand checks before posting, the service charge year calendar, arrears letters at the right stage and contractor chasing. It should not decide what is recoverable or sign off accounts; a property manager or accountant does. Overlyft can set up an AI assistant that is built for that work.
Where this comes from: Arithmetic on the hours entered; the checking share is our stated assumption and can be changed. Rules behind what is drafted: Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, sections 20, 20B and 21B; Service Charges (Consultation Requirements) (England) Regulations 2003
AEO Lookup editorial team
We write practical guides for people who run small UK firms, and we check every fact against its source on the date shown. Read how we review, or tell us if something has changed.
