Records that survive a change of managing agent

When a managing agent is replaced, the building usually loses more than a contract. It loses its memory. Inspection records, contractor histories, fire risk assessments, plans and correspondence often live in the outgoing agent's systems, and what crosses over to the new agent is whatever the handover happened to capture, in whatever state it was in. Years of work can become unreachable not because anyone destroyed it, but because the building never owned it in the first place. The buildings that come through an agent change cleanly are the ones whose records were never tied to the agent at all.

The records belong to the building, not the agent

The principle that prevents most of this trouble is easy to state and routinely ignored: a building's compliance history belongs to the building. The agent manages it; they do not own it. When that distinction is clear in how records are held, a change of agent is a change of who has the keys, not a change of what exists behind the door. When it is unclear, the new agent starts from a partial inheritance and spends months rebuilding what was already there.

This matters beyond convenience. Under the Building Safety Act 2022, the golden thread for a higher-risk building is meant to persist through occupation as an accurate, up-to-date digital record. A golden thread that resets every time a managing agent changes is not a golden thread. The Accountable Person remains responsible for the building whether or not the agent stays the same, so the record has to be just as continuous as the duty.

What tends to get lost

In a typical agent change, the losses are concentrated in a few places. It helps to know where to look before the handover, not after.

• Contractor history. Who serviced the lift, who tested the alarm, what was found and what was fixed. This often lives in the agent's job-management system and rarely transfers whole.
• Email decisions. Approvals, agreements and explanations buried in an inbox that leaves with the person.
• Marked-up plans. Drawings amended for a fire risk assessment or after a survey, held locally rather than with the building's master records.
• The action backlog. Outstanding remedial items that the outgoing agent was tracking informally.
• Access to systems. Logins to portals, monitoring tools and document stores that simply stop working.

None of these are exotic. All of them are avoidable if the building's records sit somewhere the building controls.

Design for the change before it happens

The mistake is to treat an agent change as a one-off project to be managed when it arrives. By then the leverage is gone, because the records are wherever they are and the outgoing agent has limited incentive to do more than the minimum. The better approach is to hold the records, throughout the relationship, in a way that does not depend on any single agent's tooling. Then the change is straightforward.

The table below contrasts the two postures.

The right-hand column is not more expensive to maintain. It is usually cheaper, because the work of keeping records current happens once, in one place, rather than being duplicated and then painfully reconciled at every transition.

What a clean handover looks like

A managing-agent change that goes well has a particular feel to it. The new agent logs in and sees the live fire risk assessment, the compliance calendar with its next due dates, the contractor history, the current plans and the open actions, all dated and owned. They are not handed a box of binders or a shared drive of ambiguously named files. They inherit a working record and pick up where their predecessor left off. The building does not skip a beat, and no statutory deadline slips through the gap. This is the same continuity we describe in the handover pack: what the next manager needs, applied at the level of the whole management contract rather than a single person.

The quiet cost of getting it wrong

When records do not survive an agent change, the cost is rarely visible at the time. It surfaces later: a missed inspection because nobody knew it was due, a remedial action that fell off everyone's list, a regulator asking for a history that cannot be produced. By then the new agent is blamed for a gap they inherited. Holding the building's records independently of the agent is the cheapest insurance against that outcome, and it is entirely within the building owner's control.

SAMRISK is built so that a building's records, plans and actions belong to the building and persist across any change of agent, with access granted rather than data handed over. You can see how this works on the audits and compliance calendar pages. A building should never have to reintroduce itself to its own manager.