A hassle-free approach provided by Shackleton & Wintle to fixing those frustrating niggles around the house is proving increasingly popular with letting agents and property landlords.

The small works section of the company is saving thousands of businesses and house-holders valuable time, money and resources from anything to repairing faulty taps to mending dangerous plug sockets.

It follows Shackleton & Wintle's recent acquisition of WJL Electricals, also based in Cheltenham, which enables it to offer business and domestic customers a one-stop shop for all their heating, plumbing and electrical needs.

It is in addition to the major plumbing and heating contracts that Shackleton & Wintle, which employs 140 staff, has with a number of national house builders in and around Gloucestershire.

Small works section co-ordinator Rose Baldwin explained: "One of our biggest growth areas is customers with a portfolio of properties who don't want the bother of calling up separate plumbing and electrical firms to make appointments for them to do work.

"Everyone knows how difficult and time consuming that can be, especially if the separate plumbing and electrical contractors need to be there at the same time, not to mention the worry about whether they're actually going to turn up.

"Now that WJL Electricals have come on board, we can look after the electrical side as well as the plumbing side all at the same time and offer a complete and efficient service in relation to maintenance and repair.

"Because we've got such a huge pool of experts within the business, we can react to a specific need and be as cost effective as possible.

"Customers just need to give us a list of problems and we'll resolve them all for them.

"Though we're seeing an increasing number of letting agents and landlords with a large number of properties coming to us, this service is available to anyone.

"So it's great for landlords who perhaps have only one or two properties and work during the day, which means they don't have much spare time to get those little jobs fixed.

"All customers need to do is give us a quick call and we can manage the appointments, the paperwork and the jobs for them - it makes everything much more simple."

When every job has been completed, the details are logged for reference when similar work is necessary in the future.

"If a boiler has broken down, for instance, information from when its happened before allows us to give the engineer a heads-up on what the problem is likely to be.

"If we know it's a recurring problem, we might suggest that the customer spends a bit of money investigating the problem in order to save more money on repair bills in the future.

"Everything is designed to help the customer save time and money."

For more information about Shackleton & Wintle, visit www.shackleton-wintle.co.uk  or telephone 01242 222641.

Picture: left to right, Wes Lane from WJL Electricals with small works section co-ordinator Rose Baldwin and finance director Andy Richards from Shackleton & Wintle