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Vacant Property Void Checks

Example prompt: "Every Monday at 8am, scan our 'Properties' Google Sheet for any property between tenancies. Schedule a weekly caretaker visit on the calendar, draft the visit checklist (mail, frost check in winter, photos), log returned reports, and email the landlord an update if the void has run past 4 weeks."

The Problem

A vacant property is the kind of work that nobody owns by default. The previous tenancy has ended, the next tenant has not started, and the property sits with the office on the hook for weekly insurance-mandated visits, frost protection in winter, and a landlord who wants to know why the property is still empty in week three. The visits themselves are quick — twenty minutes, plus travel — but knowing which properties need them, scheduling the regional caretaker against the right week, remembering the seasonal frost check, and surfacing the long-void cases to the landlord before the landlord rings to ask are the parts that slip when the office is busy. A missed weekly visit is a real insurance exposure; a long-void landlord conversation that the office has not prepared for is a hard conversation to have well.

How GloriaMundo Solves It

We build a workflow that scans the portfolio every Monday for vacant properties, schedules each one's weekly visit on the regional caretaker's calendar, and drafts a visit checklist email with a seasonal frost-check section in winter and an HMO-specific section for licensed houses in multiple occupation. The checklist itself is read from the office's Standard Templates tab rather than composed by the workflow, because the visit pattern is settled and a creative reword introduces drift. When the caretaker returns the report and the manager flips the visit row to 'completed', any flagged items trigger a landlord-facing draft so the landlord hears about the leaking tap from the office, not from the next viewer. A separate Monday pass picks up any property whose void has crossed twenty-eight days and drafts a one-page status pack to the landlord with the carry cost in pounds, the marketing read, and a recommendation. Slack carries the morning summary into #void-management for the team's working list.

Example Workflow Steps

  1. Trigger (integration): Monday 8am — scan Properties for status 'Vacant — between tenancies' or 'Vacant — works in progress'.
  2. Step 1 (code): For each vacant property, compute void_days and current_season; look up the regional caretaker.
  3. Step 2 (integration): Dedupe on (property_id, this Monday) against the Void Visits Schedule; find a 45-minute slot Tuesday-Friday in core hours and create a tentative Calendar event (not sent).
  4. Step 3 (integration): Draft the visit checklist Gmail to the caretaker using the office's Standard Templates tab, with conditional Winter and HMO sections.
  5. Step 4 (conditional): When the manager flips a visit to 'Visit completed — returned' with manager_flags non-empty, draft a Gmail to the landlord summarising the flagged item and asking how they want it handled.
  6. Step 5 (llm): Monday 9am — for any property with void_days >= 28, dedupe on (property_id, void_escalation_month) and draft a one-page void status pack to the landlord as a Drive doc with the carry-cost figure.
  7. Step 6 (integration): Post one consolidated Slack message in #void-management with the morning's schedule, returned flagged items, long-void escalations, and any caretaker availability gaps.

Integrations Used

  • Gmail — drafts every caretaker visit checklist, every landlord flagged-item update, and every long-void escalation
  • Google Sheets — Properties, Tenancies, Caretaker Schedule, Void Visits Schedule, Void Property Landlord Updates, Void Property Long-Void Log, Standard Templates, Marketing Status, Works In Progress
  • Google Drive — the per-property '/Lettings/Void Updates/' folder holding the long-void status pack
  • Google Calendar — tentatively books the caretaker's 45-minute slot in core hours
  • Slack — the #void-management channel for the Monday digest

Who This Is For

Letting agents and managing agents running residential portfolios where the gap between tenancies is the office's responsibility and where the landlord's insurance terms typically mandate a weekly visit during void periods.

Time & Cost Saved

A vacant property generates roughly fifteen to twenty-five minutes of office work per week — booking the caretaker, drafting the checklist, logging the return, drafting the landlord update if there is one. Across a portfolio with five to twelve vacant properties at any given time that is half a working day to a working day per week. The harder-to-quantify saving is the long-void conversation: a landlord who hears about a flagged tap in week one rather than discovering it in week six is a landlord whose relationship with the office is in better shape, and the one-page void pack that lands in their inbox at twenty-eight days is the kind of update that pre-empts the awkward phone call.