The hall carpet problem
Somewhere in most blocks of flats there is a carpet that several hundred pairs of shoes have crossed and almost nobody has looked at closely. The clerk lets themselves in, photographs it out of habit, notes the entry phone and heads for the flat. That is not carelessness. The job was booked as an inventory of the flat, and the flat is where the tenancy agreement points.
The difficulty turns up two years later, when somebody asks about the communal door, the bin store or the parking bay and the report has no view at all. A gap in the record is not evidence of anything. It is easily read as though it were.
Two properties in a single visit
A flat is the one kind of let where the property and the building are genuinely separate things. One is a home with a kitchen, a bedroom and a bathroom doing its best. The other is a set of shared parts that belong to the structure, attract a service charge and are maintained by somebody whose name nobody in the flat can quite remember.
The lease is where that division is written down. Where the landlord owns the freehold, the tenancy agreement still does the same work of saying what has been let. Read whichever applies before the visit if you can, because the boundary is often drawn in a schedule nobody has opened since completion day.
Where the line usually falls
Normally inside the let
The front door and its lock, ironmongery and closer. Internal walls, floors and ceilings. Windows and the glazing within the flat. The kitchen, the bathroom and everything fitted in them. The boiler and the consumer unit, wherever they live. A balcony or terrace, if the lease includes it, which is worth checking rather than assuming. Meters, if they sit inside the flat. If they sit in a communal cupboard, they are still worth a note and a photograph.
Normally outside it
Stairs and landings. The communal front door and its entry system. Lifts. Bin stores, bike stores and pram stores. Shared gardens and paths. External walls and roof. Any parking area, though the bay itself gets its own heading below because it deserves one.
What is worth writing down beyond the door
Condition as seen on the day, access, and how many keys or fobs changed hands. That is the whole method. No conclusions about who should be repairing what.
The entry system and the building door
How many buttons on the panel, which one reaches the flat, whether the release works while the visit is under way, and whether the flat receives a fob, a key or a code. Note how many were issued. A fifteen button panel with three labels still legible is entirely normal and says nothing about compliance, but it says a great deal to the next person about how to get in.
Bin stores, bike stores and small rooms with strong opinions
Where they are, whether the key on the fob actually opens them, and what condition they are in. Count the bins if there are bins to count. Resist the urge to work out whose collection contract it is, or whether somebody is paying twice for the privilege. That is a management question, and it will be settled by a person with a spreadsheet and a great deal of patience.
Lifts, stairs and lighting
Whether a lift exists, whether it was running on the day, and any notice on display. A laminated card reading temporarily out of service, undated and curling at one corner, is one of the small monuments of building management. Record it as found and carry on. Stair condition, handrails and landing lighting can all be described in the time it takes to walk up them.
Parking bays and permits
The bay number, the markings, the barrier or fob, and whether the bay forms part of the let or is licensed separately by the management company. That last distinction causes more confusion than almost anything else in a block, and it is not one a clerk can settle from the pavement. Note what the paperwork says, note what is physically there, and leave the two facts sitting quietly beside each other.
Building rules and rubbish day
Any rules the landlord or agent supplies: bins out on a particular evening, nothing stored in the hall, bicycles not left in the lift lobby, nothing on the balcony. Rubbish day is the one piece of building information every tenant learns within a week and almost no landlord writes down.
The people who look after the building
The name and contact number of the managing agent, if supplied. The building name and address as they appear on the paperwork. Any service charge information the landlord has chosen to pass across, recorded rather than commented on. And the key and fob count, worth setting down here even though it has a guide of its own.
Fire doors and alarms: describe, do not diagnose
The shared parts of a building will usually have fire doors, closers and often a communal alarm system. The flat will have its own smoke alarms, and carbon monoxide alarms where the rules require them.
What a property record can do is describe. The fire door is present, the closer pulls the door shut, the strip around the frame is intact, the panel shows a green light, the notice asks for the door to be kept closed. What it should not do is hand down a verdict on whether that door complies. Compliance is a fire safety question, and the person equipped to answer it is carrying out a fire risk assessment of the shared parts, not an inventory.
There is a real temptation to write fire door compliant because it sounds thorough. It is not thorough. It is a professional opinion nobody asked for and nobody can stand behind two years later.
The sentence that does the heavy lifting
One line at the end of the shared areas section pays for the whole exercise:
> Shared parts of the building were viewed from the communal entrance, stairs and landing on the date shown. They are maintained by others and are described as seen, not tested or assessed.
Adjust the wording to suit the visit. The point is that a reader can see exactly where the record stopped.
Say plainly what was not looked at
The bin store was locked. The roof was not accessed. The garage block was visited but the individual garage was not opened. The rear communal garden could not be reached from the flat.
None of these admissions weakens a report. A record that says what it does not cover is more trustworthy than one that quietly implies it covered everything, and it gives the reader a clear question to ask instead of a vague suspicion to nurse.
Back inside the flat
The building is half the job, and the flat still needs the full room by room treatment. Two things are worth flagging here. First, the windows and the front door, because these are where the flat meets the building and where responsibility for repair can be genuinely unclear. Second, the balcony or terrace, including its surface, drainage and any fixing points, since these are often assumed by one document and left out of the other.
Where to check the rules before relying on any of this
Fire safety in rented homes, including the shared parts, is covered by GOV.UK guidance, which is the right place to start rather than a secondary summary. The Housing Health and Safety Rating System is the framework local authorities use to assess hazards in dwellings, and it can reach the common parts of a building containing flats; GOV.UK publishes the guidance. The leasehold and tenancy framework itself sits on legislation.gov.uk, which is where to read the provision rather than a description of it. Propertymark publishes consumer guidance that helps explain the split between landlord, letting agent and managing agent.
The government's proposals for commonhold reform are, at the time of writing, proposals. If they turn up in a report or a conversation, treat them as a direction of travel rather than the current position.
Why any of this is worth the trouble
Not because it settles anything. A record of the shared parts will not decide who pays for a new stair carpet, and the clerk will not be invited to that meeting. What it does mean is that when the question comes, there is a dated description to look at instead of a memory, and a clear statement of where the inspection ended. In a building of thirty flats, that is about as much as one visit can honestly give you.