The first 90 days of running your own building

Taking over the management of your building is the milestone. The day after is when the actual work starts — and for most new resident directors, that day arrives with no handbook and a slightly daunting silence.

This is that handbook. It doesn’t matter much which route brought you here: a Right to Manage company, a residents’ management company named in your leases, or a freehold your block bought between you. Once you’re in charge, the first three months look broadly the same. Get the money visible, get the paperwork in one place, get your legal dates known, and get decisions being made properly. Do those four things and the rest becomes manageable.

Here’s a practical order to work through.

Weeks 1–2: take stock of what you’ve actually got

Before changing anything, find out where things stand.

Get the handover, in full. If you’ve taken over from a managing agent or a previous freeholder, you’re owed the building’s records — accounts, contracts, certificates, correspondence, keys and access details. An outgoing agent doesn’t have the right to stall a handover by sitting on records or funds. If yours is dragging, put the request in writing, be specific about what’s outstanding, and set a reasonable deadline.

Find the money. Identify every account the building holds — the operating account, and any reserve or sinking fund. If you’ve come to this by Right to Manage, the outgoing party has to pay over the accrued, uncommitted service charge money, including reserves. One thing that catches new RTM directors out: old arrears don’t come with it. You take on the cash that’s actually there, not the right to chase debts that built up before you took over. If there’s a dispute about the amount, the tribunal can decide it.

List what’s under contract. Insurance, cleaning, gardening, lifts, fire alarm servicing, buildings insurance. Note what each costs, when it renews, and whether you’re tied in. You don’t have to change any of it yet — you just need to know it exists.

Weeks 3–4: get organised before you get busy

Put everything in one place. The single biggest change from being managed to managing yourselves is that the records are now your responsibility. Leases, certificates, insurance schedules, accounts, minutes, contracts — they need a home everyone who should see them can reach, not a drawer in one director’s flat or a personal email account.

Sort out the money’s plumbing. The building’s funds should sit in the building’s account, clearly separate from anyone’s personal finances, with more than one person able to see it. Transparency here isn’t a nicety — it’s the thing that keeps trust intact when someone eventually asks where their service charge went.

Set up how you’ll talk to each other. Decide how decisions get proposed, discussed and recorded. It sounds trivial until the first contested spend, at which point “who agreed to this?” becomes a real question. A simple, visible record of what was decided and by whom saves a great deal later.

Weeks 5–8: the compliance you can’t skip

This is the part that feels dull and turns out to matter most. None of it is optional, and missing it is how resident-run buildings get into trouble.

Know your statutory dates. As a company — RTM, RMC or freehold company alike — you have Companies House obligations: a confirmation statement each year, and annual accounts. Miss them and the company can be struck off, which is a serious problem when that company is what holds your right to manage or your freehold.

Get on top of fire safety. This applies to every block, whatever its height. A competent, current fire risk assessment covering the common parts is the baseline legal duty for any residential building — there’s no height below which it stops mattering. On top of that baseline, taller buildings carry extra duties: blocks over 11 metres have specific fire-door checking requirements, and higher-risk buildings — broadly 18 metres or seven storeys and up — must register with the Building Safety Regulator and meet a fuller safety-case regime. Newer still, buildings in England that are 18 metres/7 storeys or more — or over 11 metres with a simultaneous evacuation strategy — have had to put Residential Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans (RPEEPs) in place for residents who’d struggle to get out, since these came into force on 6 April 2026. This duty doesn’t currently extend to Wales. The practical step for a new director is simple: find out what height band your building sits in, check what’s in date, and get a competent assessor if you’re unsure. This is the one area where a lapse has real consequences.

Confirm your insurance is live and in your name. Buildings insurance must be continuous. If you’ve taken over management, make sure the policy has actually transferred and you’re the one holding it, not the previous manager. A lapse here is uniquely expensive.

If any of this is in dispute — a handover that won’t happen, a service charge disagreement — the Leasehold Advisory Service gives free, government-funded guidance.

Weeks 9–12: settle into a rhythm

By now the fires are out and it’s about building habits that last.

Plan the year’s spending. Draft a service charge budget for the year: what you expect to spend, split the way the leases require, set aside something for the reserve. Residents accept charges far more readily when they can see what they’re for.

Set your first proper decisions in motion. Whatever you deferred in the scramble of month one — a contractor to review, a quote to get, a rule to agree — start working through it in an orderly way now.

Write things down as you go. The habit that separates buildings that run smoothly from buildings that lurch from crisis to crisis is boring and simple: keep records as things happen, not in a panic before the AGM.

A note on which route you took

The three routes differ mainly in the edges, not the day-to-day:

• If you’re a Right to Manage company, your acquisition date is the moment the functions transfer — before it you have no management role, after it the service charges are paid to you. The early handover of funds and information is the thing to get right.
• If you’re a residents’ management company, you may have been running for years, or you may have just taken over from a developer or their agent. Either way, treat this as a reset: the checklist above is a good audit even for an established RMC.
• If your block owns its freehold, you carry landlord-side obligations the other two don’t — but the management job itself is the same, and everything above applies.

The good news

Here’s what nobody tells you at the start, and what’s worth holding onto: none of this requires you to become a property professional. It requires you to be organised, transparent, and consistent. That’s it. Buildings don’t run badly because the residents aren’t clever enough — they run badly because the information ends up scattered, the money is opaque, and nobody wrote down what was decided. Fix those three things and you’re already ahead of most professionally managed blocks.

And it genuinely gets easier. The first 90 days feel like a lot because you’re doing everything for the first time. Month four is calmer. By the end of your first year, the rhythm is familiar — the dates are in the calendar, the records are where they should be, and the decisions get made without drama. Residents who took over a building expecting a burden are often surprised to find they’d rather run it themselves than hand it back.

This is exactly what we built SavvyPlace to do. It gives your building one place to hold its records, track its money openly, stay on top of every statutory date, and make decisions everyone can see — the whole checklist above, in one tidy system built specifically for resident-run buildings in England and Wales. It doesn’t replace your judgement, and it never touches your money. It just takes the scattered, easy-to-drop parts of the job and makes them calm and visible — so your first 90 days, and every 90 after them, are far more manageable than that daunting silence on day one suggests.

You’ve taken control of your building. The hard part is behind you. The rest is just keeping it organised — and that part, we can help with.

Building safety, fire safety and Companies House duties described here reflect the rules as of July 2026. The RPEEP duty described above applies in England only; Companies House duties apply UK-wide. Regulatory thresholds and dates can be updated by government guidance, so check current requirements for your building’s height band before relying on them.