Addressing the Maintenance Skills Shortage and the Future of Repairs

Build-to-rent has changed what residents expect from their building. In professionally managed blocks, the speed and quality of repairs is no longer back-office housekeeping; it is the product. A heating fault fixed the same day, by an engineer who gets it right first time, is the difference between a renewed tenancy and a bad review. Yet the part of the chain that delivers that experience, the skilled tradespeople, is the part under the most strain.

Britain is short of hands-on engineers, and the gap widens every year. Those who service the boilers, heating, electrics and plumbing across our blocks are retiring faster than the industry can replace them. Apprenticeships take years, fewer young people are entering the trades, and every time an experienced engineer leaves, decades of knowledge go with them. For block and BTR operators that shows up as slower repairs, missed out-of-hours calls, compliance pressure and rising costs.

It is a problem that TrainAR’s founder knows from the inside. Ettan Bazil started his gas apprenticeship in his 30s, qualified in 2015, and built a heating and plumbing firm into a fleet of vans before moving into technology. When he left that business it went into liquidation within months, unable to recruit qualified engineers fast enough to keep up. 

“A trade is a craft, learned by standing next to someone who knows what they are doing,” he says. “The problem is there are not enough of those people to go around. We set out to let one expert be in many places at once.”

TrainAR’s platform pairs AR smart glasses with a live AI tutor. The glasses see the job through the camera and guide the engineer through it in real time, by voice. It is not a training video to watch later or a manual to leaf through: the guidance is assembled in the moment from the structured procedures of senior engineers, so the person on the tools gets the right next step for the exact appliance in front of them, when they need it. In effect, an expert is present on every job.

For block and BTR maintenance, that connects directly to the things operators care about. A newly qualified engineer, or an in-house maintenance technician, can safely carry out work that would normally be years beyond them, which means more first-time fixes, fewer repeat visits, and faster resolution of the reactive faults that drive resident complaints. One commercial heating company working with TrainAR estimates it takes ten years to take an engineer from newly qualified to master installer; live guidance compresses that journey while freeing senior people for the jobs that genuinely need them. Because every job is captured, it also builds an auditable record that supports compliance across a portfolio.

TrainAR is built to fit the way maintenance teams and contractors already work. It connects to the major job-management platforms, including Simpro, Commusoft, Joblogic and Big Change, so jobs, notes and parts flow through the systems firms already use, and it draws on Parts Arena’s library of exploded diagrams for tens of thousands of appliances so the right part is identified on site. The company is backed by partners and investors from across UK proptech and field service.

There is a second opportunity in the same technology. As AI displaces white-collar roles, a growing pool of career-changers is looking for hands-on work that cannot be automated away, while government targets demand tens of thousands of additional heat pump installers this decade, far beyond current training capacity. The same AI tutor that brings an apprentice up to speed can turn a career-switcher into a competent installer in a fraction of the usual time.

The skills gap will not close overnight. But for block and build-to-rent operators whose reputation rests on how well their buildings are looked after, the ability to capture what the best engineers know and put it, live, on the glasses of the next generation may prove one of the more important shifts of the decade.