Is your block of flats keeping up with current tenant expectations?

Renting standards in the UK have moved on, and the gap between an average block of flats and a well-run one has rarely been more visible. Tenants compare properties more carefully than they used to, leaseholders ask sharper questions, and a building that felt perfectly acceptable five years ago can now look tired against newer stock. For freeholders, the shift matters for more than reputation. It feeds into rental yields, void periods, leaseholder relations and the long-term value of the asset.

The freeholders pulling ahead have all reached the same conclusion: “good enough” no longer protects what it used to. Four areas in particular have moved the goalposts.

Building safety: a higher bar of evidence

The first place the standard has shifted is in what freeholders are expected to prove. Since the Building Safety Act, the bar for higher-risk buildings is documented, ongoing evidence of compliance rather than a folder of old certificates. Even for blocks that sit below the higher-risk threshold, fire risk assessments under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order have tightened in practice, and leaseholders, lenders and insurers now ask questions they didn’t ask a few years ago. The freeholders ahead of this are the ones with up-to-date assessments, clear records of who is responsible for what, and a known process for acting on findings.

Insurance sits close to all of this. It’s worth reviewing your freeholder building insurance alongside any major safety or plant decision, since the building’s condition shapes the cover available. The same also applies to block of flats insurance, where outdated systems or unresolved safety findings can affect both risk and rebuild considerations.

Energy performance: clearing the bar, not scraping it

If safety is about demonstrable evidence, energy performance is about how high the bar itself has moved. Two confirmed pieces of policy have set the direction. Through the Warm Homes Plan, privately rented homes in England and Wales must reach EPC C for all tenancies by October 2030. The newer standard is a building that clears that comfortably across every unit, not one that scrapes through on the lowest-rated flat.

The Future Homes Standard, published in 2026 under Part L of the Building Regulations, then sets the direction for new stock; Savills has a useful summary in its plain-English guide to the standard. It doesn’t apply to existing blocks, but it sets the benchmark buyers, tenants and lenders measure every building against.

Practically, that means treating the EPC schedule as a planning document rather than a compliance one. Insulation, glazing, ventilation and lighting all play a part, alongside the heating system. Freeholders who run an energy audit early, prioritise the cheapest wins first and build the bigger items into a reserve fund tend to arrive at 2030 without panic.

Heating: the biggest single lever

The single biggest lever inside that energy picture is the heating system. Communal heating used to be something freeholders rarely thought about until it broke, but the standard has shifted from “still working” to “fit for the next two decades.” The communal system feeds into the rating of every flat in the building, so an ageing one can quietly hold the whole block back.

For most blocks, the realistic low-carbon route at end-of-life is a heat pump system. The technology is the same in principle as a domestic unit, but specifying it for a whole building is a different exercise: heat loss calculations across the property, finding space for plant, phasing the installation so residents keep their heating and hot water, and controls that work for a shared system.

This is genuinely specialist work, and it’s worth understanding how commercial air source heat pump systems work before committing. A specialist installer such as Independent Heating & Cooling will carry out a building-wide assessment first, covering heat loss calculations, plant siting, phasing for occupied flats and controls integration, so the system is sized to the building rather than the brochure, and the cost picture is clear before any work begins.

You should also declare an air source heat pump system installation to your insurer. It’s a material change to the building’s plant and services, and to ensure you keep accurate cover for the property the insurer should be notified before the work is planned, not after completion.

Resident communication: proactive, not reactive

Standards have risen on the plant and the paperwork, and just as much on what residents actually experience. The old standard was responding to complaints when they came in. The new one is keeping leaseholders informed before they need to ask. Major works consultation under Section 20 is the legal floor, not the ceiling, and the freeholders pulling ahead tend to do three things consistently:

• Share a forward view of planned works and reserve fund spending
• Explain the reasoning behind major decisions before issuing bills
• Keep residents updated through disruptive work rather than going quiet

None of it is complicated, but it changes how a service charge demand lands. A bill people have seen coming, and understand the reasoning for, is far easier to accept than one that arrives without warning.

The bigger picture

These four threads are really the same thread. Building safety, energy performance, heating and communication are the areas where the standard has moved most visibly, and the freeholders keeping pace are the ones who’ve stopped treating “good enough” as a goal. The blocks that will hold their value through the rest of this decade are the ones being run with the next ten years in mind, not the last ten. Tenants notice, leaseholders notice, and increasingly, so do lenders and insurers.