Getting the most from Stead.

When you first open Stead you create an account with an email and password, or sign in with Google, Apple or Microsoft. From there a short setup walks you through your home.

Choosing your mode

Stead works three ways, and you pick the one that fits:

• Homeowner — for the home you live in and own.
• Renter — for a home you rent, with the tenancy details that matter to you.
• Landlord — for one or more properties you let, with the extra tools that come with that.

You can change your mode later from Account, so don't worry if your situation shifts.

Setting up your home

Enter your address and Stead looks up your home's official energy certificate for you, fills in what it can about the property, and sets up a starter set of reminders. You can label your rooms then or come back to it. The "finish setting up your account" card on the dashboard nudges you through the first few useful steps, and clears them off as you go.

The dashboard is your home screen. At the top you'll find your property name (tap it to switch property if you have more than one), and a quick view of what's outstanding.

The health ring

The ring shows a count of the things that need sorting: overdue tasks, documents that have expired or are about to, and an expired energy certificate. A green tick means you're all clear. Tap the ring to open a list of those items and jump straight to each one.

Further down sits your Home Health summary, which is the same idea taken wider — a score for the whole home rather than a count of what's urgent — and it opens into its own screen.

Seasonal tips and suggestions

Through the year Stead surfaces timely home-care prompts, tailored to your home and the season, like clearing gutters in autumn or lagging pipes before winter. You can add any of them as a task in one tap, ask AI Fix about it, or dismiss it. The Tasks tab also has a "Suggested for your home" card with jobs matched to your property's type, age and heating.

Every other screen tells you about one thing. Home Health, which opens from your dashboard, is the view across all of them: a score out of 100 built from what's overdue, what's expiring, what's uncovered and what's unserviced, with the trend since last month next to it.

What moves the score

It's scored from your own records: tasks, documents and certificates, appliance servicing, warranties and cover. Nothing it deducts is a mystery. Every point comes off a row you can tap and fix, and the list leads with the quickest wins, each showing the points it puts back, so ten minutes goes on the thing that actually shifts the number.

What's already fine

There's a "looking after itself" list too, so a well-kept home gets told it's well kept rather than nagged. And you can copy or download the whole summary if a valuer, an insurer or a buyer ever asks what's been done to the place.

One honest caveat: the score reads your records, so it's only as good as what's in them. An empty Documents area looks like missing paperwork rather than a home that doesn't need any, so it's worth getting your certificates in first.

Your property report pulls together the official energy certificate for your address along with the key facts about your home. It works for current and expired certificates, and across England, Wales and Scotland, with Northern Ireland covered where the data is published.

Your energy rating

You'll see your current and potential energy band, the estimated annual running costs, and how each part of your home, walls, roof, windows, heating and so on, is rated. If your certificate has expired, Stead flags it and helps you arrange a new one, and adds a renewal reminder.

Improving your rating

The report lists the improvements your certificate recommends, with indicative costs. Where a measure has no cost on the certificate, Stead shows a general guide figure so you still get a sense of the scale. Landlords also get a clear read on the energy standards that apply to rented homes, and a "getting to band C" view that ties the suggested improvements to the parts of the home scoring worst.

The Tasks tab has three panels, and they answer three different questions: what needs doing, what has a date on it, and what happened.

Tasks — the work

Your home's to-do list. Stead sets up a starter set of routine jobs, and you can add your own at any time, with a due date and how often they repeat.

Key dates — the dates

One timeline of everything Stead can put a date on: deposit protection windows, holding-deposit clocks, notice periods and the use-it-by long stops that follow them, Right to Rent re-check anniversaries, certificate and warranty expiries, tenancy ends, energy tariff end dates. Each one is worked out for the nation your property is in rather than one English rule applied to everyone, and the whole timeline — or a single row — goes to your own calendar: an .ics file with a reminder already on it on the web, a dated share sheet on the phone.

Logs — the record

The property's history. Repairs and issues with the day you reported them and every status update since, rent paid or received, service history with who did the work and what it cost, and your tradespeople directory. Underneath it sits the home logbook: one record of every work, service, certificate and improvement at the address, which you can export to hand on when you sell.

Repairs and the response window

When a repair is logged, Stead dates a "respond by" from the day it was reported: 24 hours for anything ticked as affecting health or safety, 14 days for everything else. Once the issue moves off "reported" — acknowledged, or in progress — the window is met and it stops counting.

That window is a prompt to chase, not a legal deadline, and Stead says so wherever it appears. The repairing obligation is to put things right within a reasonable time, and what's reasonable depends on the issue.

Reminders

Tasks and document expiry dates can remind you before they're due. You choose whether to be reminded in the app, by email, or both, and how often you'd like a summary, all under Account then Notifications.

Service history

Tap the history icon on a task to log work that's been carried out: the date, what was done, who did it and what it cost, with a running total. You can save the tradesperson to your contacts at the same time, and landlords can log the cost straight to their rental P&L.

Keep your certificates, warranties, manuals and photos together in the Documents area. Upload PDFs and images, preview them without leaving the app, and search by name, category or notes when you need one back.

Expiry dates

Add an expiry date to anything that has one and the list colours itself: amber 30 days out, red once it's lapsed. The renewal date can go to your calendar as an .ics file, and you can be reminded before it happens under Account then Notifications.

Sharing a document

You can send a conveyancer, letting agent or tradesperson a link that stops working on a date you choose, or bundle several documents into one pack. A share panel lists every link you currently have out and the day each one dies, so nothing is quietly still open six months later. Worth knowing: a timed link expires on its own, and clearing an entry from that list tidies the list rather than pulling a live link back — so keep the window short for anything sensitive.

What's missing, and how much room is left

The top of the list is the part people use most. A key-documents checklist tells you which of the papers every UK home should have on file you haven't got yet, and a storage meter shows how much of your free allowance is used before you run into it. Landlords can look at every property's documents at once or one property at a time.

Your files are hosted in the EU, with row level access controls so only your account can read them, and each document is reachable only through a short lived signed link.

Something not working? Open AI Fix, describe what's happening, like a radiator that won't heat up or a damp patch, and you'll get practical next steps, what to check first, and when it's time to call someone in.

On the web you can attach a photo of the problem to help. Your conversations are saved so you can come back to them, which doubles as a handy record if you ever need to show what was tried. When AI Fix suggests a fix you can turn it into a task, so it doesn't get forgotten.

If an answer stops part-way

Connections drop, and sometimes an answer stops mid-sentence. When that happens you get two buttons under it. Carry on from here picks the answer up from exactly where it stopped, so you keep your place instead of re-reading three paragraphs you'd already read. Try again is the other one, for when what arrived was wrong rather than merely unfinished: it throws the half-answer away and asks again from scratch.

You'll find the same pair anywhere Stead writes you an answer — AI Fix, the rights and obligations chat, and the support chat — in the same order, doing the same thing.

The Emergency area keeps the things you'd scramble for in a crisis to hand: where your stopcock and fuse box are, how to turn off the gas, and the numbers that matter. Every property starts with the key national emergency numbers built in, and you can add your own contacts, like your plumber, electrician or letting agent, on top.

Renting is the part of a home with real dates attached, and they are not the same in the four UK nations. Stead's tenancy tools work the dates out for the nation your property is in, show the provision each one came from, and link the legislation so you can check it yourself. They're planning tools, not legal advice, and every one of them says so on the way in.

The holding-deposit clock

New this release. In landlord mode, open Obligations from your dashboard, then Starting a tenancy, then Holding deposit clock. It sits next to Protect the deposit on purpose: they're the two clocks that money starts, in the order you meet them.

In England, Schedule 2 to the Tenant Fees Act 2019 runs two clocks from the day you receive a holding deposit. The deadline for agreement is the fifteenth day of the period beginning with that day — the day of receipt is day one, so it lands on that day plus 14 — and you can agree a different day with the tenant in writing. Repayment is then within 7 days beginning with the agreement date, your decision not to proceed, or the deadline, whichever applies; the same "beginning with" counting makes that the anchor plus 6. These are calendar days, so weekends and bank holidays count. There's a third, England-only clock if you mean to keep the money under one of the Act's exceptions: written reasons inside the same 7 days, and missing that means repaying anyway.

Wales has a near-twin under the Renting Homes (Fees etc.) (Wales) Act 2019, counted from the day the deposit is paid, and Stead runs it as its own branch rather than copying England's, because it genuinely differs: there's no separate Welsh limb for a landlord who pulls out, so the statutory repay-by runs from the deadline for agreement. Stead shows that date as the statutory one and adds, as good practice rather than law, that there's no reason to sit on the money once you've decided.

Scotland doesn't regulate holding deposits, it bans them. Money taken simply to hold a property is a "premium" under the Rent (Scotland) Act 1984 as applied to a private residential tenancy, and requiring or receiving one is a criminal offence. So there's no deadline to count and Stead doesn't invent one: you get the warning and the citation instead, and the advice to take the tenancy deposit when the tenancy starts.

Northern Ireland has no statutory holding-deposit regime at all — no cap, no repayment deadline — and Stead won't make one up. What governs the money is what you agreed in writing before you took it, so agree the amount, the purpose and the return date in writing. If you keep it and put it towards the tenancy deposit it becomes a tenancy deposit from that point, and the Private Tenancies (NI) Order 2006 clocks (28 days to protect, 35 to serve the prescribed information) start on it.

On the cap: England caps a holding deposit at one week's rent and defines that as the annual rent divided by 52, so a monthly rent is × 12 ÷ 52 — not ÷ 4. Wales caps it at a week's rent too but gives no formula, so Stead shows the same arithmetic and tells you plainly that it's arithmetic and not a statutory calculation. Both dates land on your Key dates, and in England and Wales a push can reach you a week before the deadline for agreement, on the day itself, and on the last day to repay. They export to your calendar too — an .ics file on the web, a dated share sheet on the phone — and what you record is saved against the property, so coming back a week later shows your dates rather than an empty form.

Deposits paid in instalments

Landlords record this in Protect the deposit; renters get the same engine in Is my deposit protected? on Your Rights. If the deposit arrived in more than one payment, add each payment and Stead dates each one's own protection deadline instead of a single deadline for the lot — because in England, Wales and Northern Ireland the duty is triggered by receiving money, so every payment starts its own window. In Northern Ireland which window applies depends on when a payment was received, so instalments can even sit under different versions of the rules.

Scotland is the one to be careful with. Regulation 3(2A) gives each instalment its own 30 working days only where the landlord and tenant agreed the deposit would be paid in instalments. Without that agreement, regulation 3(1) still governs the whole deposit and counts from the day the tenancy began, which is usually the earlier date. So rather than quietly assume the more generous reading, Stead asks the question — did you and your landlord (or your tenant) agree it would be paid in instalments? — shows you the date you're exposed to if the answer is no, and gives you somewhere to note what evidences the agreement, like the clause or the messages where you settled it.

Switch to landlord mode and Stead grows to match. You can add as many properties as you manage and switch between them from the top of the dashboard. Obligations is the toolkit itself, grouped by the moment in a tenancy each tool belongs to: starting a tenancy, rent and payments, during and ending the tenancy.

Portfolio

Every property on one screen: the monthly rent, anything in arrears, the next tenancy to end, and a compliance row per property covering gas safety, EICR, EPC, legionella, the deposit, Right to Rent and the written statement. It exports as a dated report you can hand to an accountant or a lender.

Rental P&L

A per-property income and expenses ledger, with the expense groups following HMRC's UK property (SA105) pages so the totals map onto a self-assessment return. See your net profit at a glance, switch between tax year and calendar year, look at one property or all of them, and take an MTD-ready export or a tidy PDF. Add your company details once and they appear on the report header.

Notices

The Notices tool drafts a possession notice for your nation and the ground you're relying on, with the earliest date it can lawfully state. Then it does the part most tools skip: record how and when you served it and Stead re-anchors every printed date on deemed receipt, tells you if the notice is now dated too early to be good, files a dated proof-of-service record to your Documents, and puts the use-it-by long stop on your Key dates — the last day the notice can be used before it's spent and the whole notice period has to be served again.

Be clear on what this is. Our notice wording hasn't been reviewed by a housing solicitor yet, so every draft says so and tells you to have it checked and transcribed onto the current prescribed form before you serve it. The proof-of-service record builder is built and in beta. It's a starting point to take to a solicitor, not legal advice, and a qualified review is always needed before a notice is served.

Energy standards

Your property report spells out the energy efficiency standards that apply to rented homes, what's in force now and what's proposed, and shows a path to a higher band with indicative costs.

The Account tab is home to your settings. Manage your properties, your home details, and how you're reminded under Notifications.

Security

Under Account then Security you can turn on two-factor sign-in (with one-time recovery codes to keep safe), set an app lock that uses your device's fingerprint or face unlock, and sign out everywhere if you've used a shared device.

Switching theme

Stead has a light and a dark theme. Toggle between them from the top of any screen.

Your home data is private to you and stored securely in the EU. We never sell it.

Any time you like, you can download a readable copy of everything from Account then Security then Download my data, and Stead files a copy in your Documents too. If you ever want to leave, Delete account in the Danger zone removes your account, your files and all its data, and asks you to type DELETE first. Reset all data, sitting beside it, is the gentler one: it clears what you have added but keeps your sign-in so you can start again on the same account. For the full detail, see our privacy policy.