Accent Housing Estate Services
Communal cleaning, grounds and garden maintenance, window cleaning and more.
Depending on where you live, you may benefit from certain services such as communal cleaning, grounds maintenance and/or window cleaning. These services are paid for by your service charge. Please check your tenancy agreement or annual charge notification if you are not sure what services you should receive.
Our aim is to deliver a good standard of services across all of the regions in which we operate. Most of our contractors deliver a frequency-based specification, meaning they visit your estate on a regular basis to carry out certain tasks. The contractors who deliver a frequency-based specification include:
- Greenfingers (North West)
- Malc Firth (North East and East)
- Lotus (South)
You can download a specification here.
In other areas, our contractors deliver a specification which is based on output - which means that the contractor does not have to attend your estate at a specified frequency or at an allocated time, as long as they deliver the required standard.
Your local Estates Services Officer will be jointly responsible for making sure that the specification is met, but we rely on your feedback too. We routinely survey residents about the standard of the grounds maintenance and communal cleaning services. Please let us know if you are dissatisfied and we will look into it. For urgent enquiries, please contact 0345 678 0555.
Estate Services FAQs
Our grounds maintenance teams typically cut grass 16 times a year between March and October. This works out to be around once every fortnight. It may be longer than a fortnight between visits if weather conditions for grass cutting have not been suitable. The day of the week and the time of day that grass cutting is carried out may vary.
Hedges which form a boundary and overhead branches are cut three times a year (typically January, September and November so as to avoid bird-nesting season). Individual shrubs are maintained throughout the year.
Trees in your garden are your responsibility. This applies even if you have not planted the tree yourself. In exceptional circumstances, we will support residents where trees are dead, dangerous or causing damage to property, but you may be liable for the cost.
Trees in communal areas will not normally be pruned or felled due to problems with shade, falling leaves or fruit, pollen, bird droppings or obstruction of views. However, if the tree poses a health and safety risk, we will investigate. Use our handy guide to find out if we can help.
All trees in communal areas have been professionally surveyed and any work required to maintain them in the coming years has already been scheduled.
Problems with trees which are not on Accent land should be reported to your local authority.
If you have a health and safety concern about a road or footpath on your estate, please contact us. In some cases, the local authority is responsible for maintaining the roads and footpaths in and around your estate – so we may need to work with them to reach a solution.
Our grounds maintenance team will collect any litter which has blown into the estate with the wind. They will not remove any bulky waste which has been dumped there. Please report fly-tipping here.
In some areas, we use the same contractor to carry out grounds maintenance and to remove bulky waste, but they will not be able to remove bulky waste on the same visit unless they have come prepared to deal with it.
Grounds maintenance teams do not generally grit our estates, unless it is specifically covered in your service charge. In some areas, we have arrangements in place to grit paved areas around older people’s accommodation when the temperature is due to drop below freezing.
Our grounds maintenance teams typically visit several estates in one day. They are entitled to a break and may spend it on site. Taking a break should not stop the grounds maintenance team from carrying out their work to the specification.
Cleaning teams periodically clean underneath furniture in communal areas, but they will not move customers’ possessions to clean underneath them. Communal corridors should be kept clear at all times for fire safety reasons.
Our window cleaning teams clean communal windows on a quarterly basis. They won’t generally clean the windows to individual flats.
You may wish to consider appointing a local window cleaner to clean the windows to your flat, if you cannot do this yourself. Speak to your neighbours to find out if you could ‘club together’.
