TM44: the legal inspection almost nobody markets

If you install, maintain or inspect air conditioning in the UK, there is a legal obligation sitting next to your business that generates steady search demand and that almost no firm markets against properly.

TM44 — the air conditioning energy assessment required under the Energy Performance of Buildings Regulations — applies to every system with an effective rated output over 12kW. It must be carried out by an accredited assessor, at least every five years, and the report must be lodged. It applies to a very large number of commercial buildings, and a meaningful proportion of them are not compliant, usually because nobody told the owner.

That last point is the whole opportunity.

Predictable demand is rare and valuable

Most trade demand is event-driven and therefore lumpy. A damp problem appears. A boiler fails. A building changes hands. You cannot forecast it and you cannot smooth it.

A five-year statutory cycle behaves differently. Every system inspected five years ago is due now. Every building that changes hands triggers a check. Every tenant doing due diligence asks for the certificate. The demand does not spike and it does not vanish; it accumulates.

For a marketing programme, that is close to ideal. It means the pipeline you build this quarter is still producing in two years, and it means the same page keeps working rather than needing seasonal rewrites.

The buyers do not know they are buyers

Here is where most firms get the strategy wrong.

The instinct is to target the transactional phrase — “TM44 inspection” plus a place name — and compete for the people already looking to book one. Those people exist and they are worth having. They are also the smallest and most contested slice.

The larger group is searching to find out whether this applies to them at all. They have been sent a letter, or asked for a certificate by a prospective tenant, or had a notice from the local authority, and they are trying to understand an obligation they did not know existed. They type questions:

• Does my air conditioning need an inspection
• What is a TM44 report
• How often does a TM44 inspection need doing
• Who can carry out a TM44 assessment
• What happens if I do not have one

Every one of those is a buyer. None of them is yet searching for a supplier. And the firm that answers the question is overwhelmingly likely to be the firm that gets the booking, because the buyer has no reason to go back to the results page once their question is resolved and a booking form is in front of them.

This is the same pattern we see across compliance work generally — price and obligation questions outnumber “who do I hire” searches by a wide margin — and TM44 is one of its clearest examples.

Why so few firms compete here

Three reasons, all of them structural rather than strategic.

It is a small line on a big invoice. Most firms that do TM44 work are air conditioning contractors whose main business is installation and maintenance. The inspection is a few hundred pounds. It does not feel like the thing worth building a marketing programme around, so it gets a paragraph on the services page and nothing else.

The accreditation is a barrier, so the market feels captive. It is not. Accredited assessors are findable; buyers just do not know how to find them, which means they find whoever ranks.

Nobody has done the arithmetic on what the inspection leads to. Which brings us to the actual argument.

The inspection is not the product

A TM44 assessment puts an accredited engineer inside a commercial building, with full sight of the plant, producing a formal report on its condition and efficiency, for a building owner who has just demonstrated that they take their obligations seriously enough to act on them.

That is the best-qualified maintenance lead it is possible to generate. You know the kit, you know the condition, you know the owner responds to obligations, and you have a documented reason to recommend work.

Priced as an inspection, TM44 is marginal. Priced as acquisition for the maintenance contract — which is recurring, multi-year and far higher margin — it is one of the cheapest routes into a commercial building that exists in the trade.

Run the numbers before you decide what a TM44 enquiry is worth to you. Inspection fee, plus the proportion that convert to remedial work, plus the proportion that convert to a service contract, times the realistic contract life. The figure that comes out is usually several times what firms assume, and it is the figure that should set the budget.

What to actually build

A page for the obligation, not the service. Its job is to answer “does this apply to me”, clearly, in the first screen, with the 12kW threshold and the five-year cycle stated plainly. Then the consequences of non-compliance, honestly and without scaremongering. Then what an inspection involves and what it costs.

A cost section with a real range. The single most searched variant after the obligation question is the price one. A range with the variables that move it — number of systems, building size, travel — answers it.

A booking route that matches the moment. The buyer has just learned they are obliged and non-compliant. They want it dealt with. A short form asking for postcode, rough system count and a contact, with a clear “we will confirm within one working day”, converts far better than a general enquiry form. More on that in quotation forms that qualify.

Regional pages only where you genuinely cover. TM44 requires an on-site visit, so coverage is real. Build pages for areas you will actually travel to, and resist the temptation to spray thin location pages across the country.

The honest caveat

TM44 is not a large market. It is a specific statutory inspection on a five-year cycle, and the search volume reflects that.

What makes it worth doing is the ratio. The demand is small but it is steady, it is legally compelled rather than discretionary, the buyers are commercial, the work leads directly to contracted recurring revenue, and essentially nobody is competing for the questions those buyers ask.

Small and uncontested beats large and crowded, almost every time, for a firm the size of most specialist contractors. If you want the broader version of that argument, it is in ranking without traffic.