Understanding the My Habinteg tenant portal | Tenant news

There are a number of things you can find on our My Habinteg tenant portal to help you with your tenancy, like checking your rent account and submitting a request to have a pet.

But the main benefit of signing up to our portal is that it’s the best way for Habinteg tenants to report any repairs.

Easy repairs reporting

When you report a repair via My Habinteg, the portal system records it instantly and produces an order number which you can use to track the status of the repair job.

“Using the tenant portal to report repairs means that you don’t have to call Habinteg Direct where, on busy days, you may have to wait in a telephone queue to speak to a member of our team,” said Customer Services Assistant Lesley Surman.

Note that you can only raise urgent and routine repairs through the My Habinteg portal.

If your repair is an emergency, please call Habinteg Direct, our Customer Services Team, on 0300 365 3100, or if it’s out of hours, call 0345 601 3389.

What type of repair are you reporting?

Routine repairs: theseare completed within 20 working days and includeelectric sockets not working, dripping overflows and repairs to internal fixtures.

If you have a partial loss of heating from March 31 to September 30 (British Summer Time), it’s classed as a routine repair. If this occurs during 1 October to March 30 (British Winter Time), it’s classed as an urgent repair.

Urgent repairs: theseare attended to within five working days and made safe or fixed if possible and include no hot water, a loss of heating, and minor leaks or drips from pipes.

Please note that urgent and routine repairs are completed on weekdays only. Bank holidays and weekends over Christmas may mean that repairs take longer than you expect.

Emergency repairs: we aim to make such repairs safe within 24 hours. This includes a total loss of electric power.Also,severe flooding or burst pipes, a total loss of heating in severe weather and if your scheme’s external doors are not secure.

Advice on repairs

We asked Lesley what the most common minor repairs requests are and if there are things tenants can check first before requesting a call out. The list includes:

Power cuts

Please check your fuse box, also known as a consumer unit, to see if any of the switches, also known as a residual current device (RCD), have “tripped” or switched off. Habinteg’s Property Delivery Manager Jody Davey said: “It’s often the case that a faulty electrical appliance trips out an RCD, which is a safety device that switches off electricity automatically if there’s a fault.”

If switching on a faulty appliance causes one of the RCDs to “trip” it’s safe to switch it back once the appliance has been unplugged.

If that’s not the issue, check the credit on your electricity meter where applicable, and then check with your electricity supplier to ensure there hasn’t been a power cut.

Electrical sockets

If you think one of your electric sockets is not working, please check if it’s your appliance causing the issue, rather than the socket. You can do this by plugging it into a different socket to check.

Extractor fans

If the extractor fan in your kitchen or bathroom is not working, please try and clean it if you’re able, as a build-up of grease or fluff can prevent them from operating properly.

Toilet seats and lightbulbs

Toilet seats are tenant’s responsibility, however, if yours is a specialist toilet then the seat could be a non-standard design and would be covered under your service charge, if this is the case please contact customer services.  

While light bulbs are the tenant’s responsibility, we understand that some customers including wheelchair users may need help changing a light bulb, so please get in touch with us if this is the case.

Habinteg is moving away from fluorescent tube light fittings in kitchens so when they stop working, we’re replacing with LED strip lights. “Tenants shouldn’t attempt to repair them as they are sealed units, so we would encourage tenants to report repairs of this type, although it’s worth noting that new LED lights should last around 10 years,” Jody said.