Nobody switches maintenance contractors casually. By the time you are at that decision, something has broken down — price, responsiveness, quality, trust. What most estates and property teams underestimate is the second cost of the switch: the years of maintenance history that leave with the outgoing firm.
What actually gets lost
The invoices, you keep — accounts has those. What disappears, in whole or in part, is the operational record: which assets exist and where; what was done to each one, when, and by whom; the photos that show a unit’s condition two years ago; test readings that establish a trend; which repairs recur, and how often. The incoming contractor starts with a site survey — billed to you — and spends their first year rediscovering what your last contractor already knew.
There is a compliance edge to this too: F-Gas records must be retained by the operator for five years, and owner-side record duties (the Building Safety Act’s golden thread being the clearest example) do not pause because your contract changed hands.
If you are switching soon: the exit checklist
- Ask for the asset register first — with locations, serials and install dates, in a structured format (spreadsheet at minimum), not PDF.
- Service history per asset — job records linked to assets, with dates and descriptions. A pile of job sheets sorted by invoice number is close to useless.
- Photos and worksheets — request them explicitly; they are the first thing dropped from exports.
- Certificates and F-Gas records — per system, covering the full retention period, before the relationship sours further.
- Check your contract — data-return clauses are rare in maintenance agreements; if you are renewing rather than switching, this is the moment to add one.
The structural answer: stop renting your own history
Every exit checklist is an admission of the same design flaw: the record lives on the wrong side of the relationship. Reverse it, and the problem dissolves. When the asset register and its history are held in your account — with contractors granted access while they work for you — a change of contractor becomes an access change, not a data migration. The outgoing firm’s completed work stays attached to your assets. The incoming firm starts from a complete record on day one.
This is the principle FaciliTasker is built on: records anchored to the building, owner-held, contractor-independent. Contractors work in the same platform — their worksheets and photos land directly in your record — and when a relationship ends, their access freezes while your history stays intact. If a contract change is on your horizon, book a demo before you start the exit, not after.
