Ask a landlord whether a home is safe and you will usually get an answer from one place. The compliance team points to the certificates. The complaints team points to the case log. The board points to its assurance report. Each answer can be accurate, and each is also a view from a single seat.

Three records bear on whether a home is safe and whether the landlord can prove it. One describes the building. One describes what happened to the person living in it. One describes how the rest of the sector is being judged on exactly these questions. We build a product for each: CertsVault, TenantSafe and ScoreView. They are separate products, and they are useful separately. They are more useful read together, and the reason is the same one that makes a second opinion worth having.

What each record knows

CertsVault holds the building. It keeps one record per home: the gas, electrical, fire, water, asbestos and energy certificates, the hazards logged against it, and the remedial actions with an owner, a due date and proof of closure. A job counts as closed only when the proof is on the record, and a home cannot be reported as compliant until the work found has been evidenced. It answers the question a regulator asks first: what do you hold, and can you show that the work was finished?

TenantSafe holds the resident's account. It gives a tenant a dated place to log what happened as it happens, guidance in plain English, a letter with the right statutory references, and a countdown to each deadline. It is free for residents and consent-gated: the tenant owns their story, and the complaints team receives a structured, prioritised case. It answers the question the building cannot: when did the household first tell you, and what did you do next?

ScoreView holds the outside view. It searches the full published record of Housing Ombudsman determinations, links every finding to its source document, and turns the pattern into a composite risk score and a peer comparison. It answers the question neither of the other two can: how does an organisation like ours read to the people judging us, and which failures are other providers already being found against?

None of these is a substitute for another. A certificate does not tell you whether a family was waiting. A complaint log does not tell you whether the fix held. A sector benchmark tells you neither.

One hazard, three readings

Take damp and mould, which has been under a statutory clock since Awaab's Law came into force in October 2025.

The sector record, read through ScoreView, shows where providers are being found against: which complaint categories, which remedies, how the trend is moving relative to peers. That is the cheapest research available, because the failure modes repeat. It tells a landlord what to control for before it becomes their case.

The building record, held in CertsVault, shows whether the control worked. A hazard case runs on the statutory clock in working days. The remedial action has an owner and a due date. Overdue cases and cases due within two working days are counted up front. The job is not closed until proof sits against the home.

The resident record, kept in TenantSafe, shows the part no internal system can: the date the household first raised it. The statutory clock does not start when a case is created. It starts when the landlord is told. A resident-held dated account and an organisational record that agree on that date are the strongest position a landlord can be in. Where they differ, the difference is specific and visible in week one, not in a determination eighteen months later.

Put the three side by side and each checks the others. The sector view says where to look. The building view says whether the work was done and can be proved. The resident view says whether it was done in time, from the household's side of the door.

What this means for landlords

Boards do not need more reports. They need to be told, early and in plain terms, where the picture disagrees with itself.

  • Fewer surprises at inspection. Disagreement between the outside view and the internal pack is found at your own pace, in private, not in someone else's letter.
  • A defensible answer on the clock. When the question is when the duty started and what happened next, the landlord can show its own dated record beside the resident's.
  • Effort that follows risk. The sector pattern shows which hazards to prioritise, and the building record shows which homes are exposed to them today.
  • Cleaner cases, earlier. A resident who logs the issue properly in the first place hands the complaints team a case that can be acted on, which is cheaper than one that escalates.

The calendar adds urgency. The electrical inspection deadline falls on 1 November 2026, and Awaab's Law Phase 2 extends the timescales to a further seven hazard types on 30 November 2026. Both depend on evidence a landlord can produce on the day, not on confidence that the work was done.

What this means for tenants

Tenants get more from this than the framing of "landlord software" suggests.

A resident who keeps a dated record is no longer relying on memory against an organisation's files. They know what the landlord must do and by when, and they can see the deadline coming. A landlord who holds a verified record of the home is less likely to be asking the household to repeat itself, and more likely to fix the cause once. A landlord who reads the sector record is more likely to spot a pattern before it reaches a family.

The benefit does not depend on goodwill. It depends on three records existing and being allowed to disagree with each other.

What it does not claim

None of this requires one system to feed another, and none of it overrides the tenant's consent. The resident's account stays theirs unless they choose to share it. Each product is judged on what it does today, and CertsVault and TenantSafe are in beta, with early partners shaping what gets built next. The case for reading the three together is an argument about evidence, not a promise of automation.

The sector pattern behind all of this is public and free to read. How your own organisation sits within it, and what its building and complaint records say beside it, is a different conversation and not one to have in the open. If that is useful, book a private readout. Twenty minutes, and no deck.

TenantSafe applies to England only and provides legal information, not legal advice. Regulatory dates cited here are drawn from published GOV.UK guidance and the product pages current at 19 October 2026.