Automate Tenant Document Chases

Because each follow-up has a hidden research step. Before writing anything, someone has to open the thread, work out which of the eight documents arrived, check whether the guarantor's payslip was the readable one, and only then compose a message — and that reconstruction happens again on the next round because nothing recorded the outcome.

The cost scales with the number of tenancies, not with the number of missing documents, which is why it becomes unmanageable in busy letting periods rather than gradually. Twenty tenancies at four minutes of reconstruction each is an afternoon before a single reminder goes out.

Recording state at the moment a document arrives is what removes the step. Once each item carries received, approved or needs replacing, the question "what do we chase?" is a filter rather than an investigation — the same shift described in building the tenant file online.

No more than once every three days per outstanding item, with a first reminder around day three and a clear stop after three or four attempts. Daily reminders do not accelerate anything; they get filtered, and then your genuinely urgent message is filtered with them.

Tie the cadence to the deadline, not to the calendar. A move-in date twelve days out justifies a different rhythm than one thirty days out, and tenants reasonably resent being chased weekly for a document that is not needed for a month.

Cap the total. A tenant who has ignored four reminders is not going to respond to a fifth; that case needs a phone call or a decision, and continuing to automate against it only trains the whole household to ignore your domain.

Three kinds, and each one costs you more credibility than the document is worth. First: a reminder to someone who has already submitted. If the tenant uploaded everything on Tuesday and the day-seven reminder still fires, they learn that your messages do not reflect reality.

Second: a reminder for an item that is waiting on you. When a document has been received and is sitting unreviewed, chasing the tenant for it is worse than silence. Suppression has to be driven by item status, which is why per-item state is a prerequisite for automation rather than a refinement of it.

Third: a reminder sent to the whole household when one person is outstanding. Address the person who owes the document — the compliant tenant should never receive a chase, and the guarantor should not be copied on a message about someone else's payslip.

Name the item, give the link, state the deadline, and stop. "We still need your last three months of payslips before 14 March — upload them here" is complete. A message that says "your file is incomplete" forces the tenant to come and find out what is missing, which is the step most of them will postpone.

Keep the tone the same as a colleague would use. Automated messages drift into either legal stiffness or false cheerfulness, and both read as machine-generated; the tenant is more likely to act on something that sounds like the person who showed them the flat.

Send it from a real, monitored address, because a proportion of tenants will reply to it with a question rather than click. Those replies are the best signal you have about which instructions are unclear — see what actually stops the chasing for how to feed them back into the request.

Two numbers answer it. Median days from request to a complete, approved file tells you whether the process got faster; average reminders sent per completed tenancy tells you whether it got faster by being better or by being louder.

If completion time falls while reminders per tenancy also falls, the requests themselves improved. If completion time falls while reminders per tenancy rises, you have bought speed with goodwill, and the next batch of tenants will be slower to respond than this one.

Look at which items generate the most reminders and fix those requests rather than adding another reminder step. An item that consistently needs three chases has an instruction problem, and rewriting it once removes the work permanently — which is also the logic behind automating the onboarding sequence.