The London Management Company looks after some of the most prestigious and opulent properties in Central London, Surrey, and Manhattan, and we’ve carefully and meticulously cultivated the reputation of excellent customer service.
Our clients deserve a streamlined, stress-free home ownership experience, and we’re delighted to facilitate it. Consider us the curators of your lifestyle, smoothly taking care of the operations of your luxury and super-luxury homes.
It is our belief that you deserve a home that’s cared for—one that you can enjoy without having to worry about the nitty-gritty details.
We’d be delighted to help you choose a residence management company that will serve you the way we do.
As such, here are our top tips on what to look for in your luxury property management company.
What to look for in your luxury property management company
Value for money
When it comes to the care of your luxury home, you want the best. That’s especially true if it’s unoccupied for a few months of the year.
An empty house still requires cleaning and for someone to check it regularly to ensure it remains in perfect condition. Not having someone checking in could also affect your homeowner’s insurance.
As such, you’d be happy to pay to keep your house looking and functioning well. You obviously want the best luxury property management services, regardless of the value of your home.
However, there’s cost and then there’s value for money.
Sometimes, you might find luxury residence management companies charge you based on the value or size of your home. So, you’d be paying more for the same services as another luxury homeowner whose house is smaller than yours.
Again, it might be a price you can afford, but is it good value for money?
That’s why we recommend shopping around for quotes before you make a decision. As with anything else, get at least three quotes from three different companies to find one that gives you what you require at a competitive price.
Find one, like The London Management Company, that charges a fair market rate for a high standard of care, regardless of your property value. Most importantly, ensure that the service you pay for is linked to the service you receive, i.e. if you require a higher-touch service, you should pay more. Conversely, if you require a more relaxed service, you should pay less accordingly.
An in-house management team
When you’re choosing a luxury property management company, you expect one that offers personalised service. You also want consistency in service and speediness in response.
You can only get those from a company with an in-house team.
For example, at The London Management Company, we have staff on call 24/7. Our team consists of an in-house cleaning and housekeeping team, trained and quality-assured by us, as well as an in-house maintenance team, and also an in-house window cleaning, jet washing, and gutter cleaning team.
If our clients have any problems, we’re there to solve them, no matter the notice they give us to rectify the issue.
Most importantly, we provide the same quality of service every time.
Relying on Agency teams or outsourced services would mean being bound by their rates, terms of service, and working hours. We wouldn’t be able to offer efficient, affordable, and excellent services. It would also be impossible to guarantee consistent quality, as that would be out of our control.
Keeping as many of our operations as possible “in-house” allows us to provide our clients with a consistent rate and high-quality, prompt, and efficient services.
A dedicated property manager
When you hire someone to take care of your luxury home, you want them to take over its management. You want them to treat your home the way you would, to understand its needs—and yours.
It’s important they take ownership of the relationship.
A single representative who manages your property is able to give you that.
We pride ourselves on our personalised service and can honestly claim that we know our clients’ properties better than they do.
That’s because we provide each of our clients with a dedicated property manager. This person familiarises themselves with not just the quirks and facets of the building but also the client’s specific needs and requirements.
We know exactly how the client wants their living room to look, with a flower arrangement just there. We know exactly how they want their refrigerator stocked.
When you hire someone to take care of your luxury home, you want them to take over its management. You want them to treat your home the way you would, to understand its needs—and yours.
We also curate a Planned Preventative Maintenance Schedule for each property. This covers all the maintenance needs to keep the warranties and guarantees valid and the property working properly.
This knowledge helps us provide the perfect luxury home experience; it also helps build trust with our clients. We have a personal relationship with them, which means they know they can leave everything to us.
Because we know what they want. Because we have worked hard to find out their requirements.
If you don’t have a single point of contact, you’ll find yourself explaining what you want every time you need something done. That will make managing your luxury home your burden, rather than that of the company that you’ve hired.
Why make things harder for yourself when you could get a company that would take that stress away from you?
Proactive service
Preventative maintenance is essential for a smooth and functional luxury home. This ties in with our previous point about a dedicated property manager who takes ownership of the relationship.
You need someone who stays one step ahead of potential issues. Our property managers curate a planned preventative maintenance schedule for each home we manage. They ensure that our clients will never come home to a broken boiler or a cloudy swimming pool.
We manage service contracts to ensure that the home runs smoothly whenever the owner wants to use it. This is a key consideration when choosing a luxury property management company.
Regular testing and reporting
The unfortunate truth is that, sometimes, in spite of regular maintenance, things do still break down occasionally. You can mitigate some such situations through regular monitoring and testing.
For example, each time we inspect the property, we flush the pipes and check the utilities, WiFi, and heating or cooling systems. If we spot any potential issues, we’ll fix them immediately.
Allowing our clients to arrive and enjoy their home as it is intended.
24/7 response
A luxury property management company needs to understand that emergencies can happen outside of normal working hours. If your security alarm goes off at night when you’re not there, you’d ideally want someone to come over immediately to check what caused it.
Again, a dedicated property manager would know the idiosyncrasies of your systems. For example, we know one of our clients has an overly sensitive alarm in their living room. If it goes off when they are due to arrive, we know how to manage it. We also know how to not set it off when we’re in there for housekeeping.
However, if we’re notified of a disturbance in a home that’s supposed to be empty, we’ll check it out even if it’s three o’clock in the morning.
To ensure that you get a response whenever required, choose a luxury property management company that is on call 24/7, 365 days a year.
Comprehensive service offerings
You want someone who can manage all aspects of luxury home management. It’s not ideal to have someone taking care of the cleaning of your property and someone else for maintenance.
Taking care of a luxury home is a lot of work, and a management company should shoulder all of that burden on your behalf.
When choosing a luxury property management company, look for one that offers maintenance, housekeeping, emergency assistance, and concierge services.
At The London Management Company, we do all of that, as well as staff management and accounting. We can also take over the employment of our client’s staff, so we manage their salary payments, overtime, and holidays.
Our property maintenance service also includes window cleaning and pressure washing services. As with everything, these are undertaken with the care and attention that a luxury home demands.
We even handle utility bill payments. That’s all of our clients’ property management and accounting needs taken care of.
A focus on luxury home management
If you’re shopping around for a luxury property management company, look for one that does that exclusively. Most companies that offer this service are real estate and block management agencies that add home management as part of their wider offerings.
Such agencies have a different focus than luxury home management companies. As such, your home may never be a priority for them.
Plus, since their area of expertise is different, you won’t get the same level of service from them as you would get from someone like us—someone who works only with luxury homeowners.
Privately owned
You might wonder why we recommend a privately owned company when a public company would be able to offer the same services.
The reason is autonomy.
A public company has stakeholders, who may want to question the operations team. They want justifications for spending, salaries, services offered, and more. Additionally, they might insist on a certain level of income generation.
On the other hand, a private company like ours is beholden to no one. We can charge competitive rates because we want to offer excellent service at a reasonable price, not because someone’s telling us to charge more to bolster their bottom line.
We can define the quality of our service because our name and reputation are important to us. Our company can work 24/7 because we don’t have anyone over our heads insisting on cutting costs by reducing staffing.
Minimal reliance on technology
Automation and technology are great. They make work easier for everyone. However, they need to be monitored by people. Especially in luxury home management, technology cannot replace the human touch.
Our team, even though it’s young and dynamic, is not overly reliant on technology. We do use it, but it’s all monitored by humans. It helps us speed up some processes and automate others. However, it’s always being monitored by a person.
Let’s take the client with the sensitive alarm, for example. We know it can go off if the wind’s blowing in the wrong direction. We know this because we take the time to become familiar with every aspect of the client’s home.
If we relied only on the alert, the client’s home would have security personnel or technicians making unnecessary calls to the house all the time, incurring unnecessary additional costs.
However, we familiarise ourselves with the client’s schedule. That way, visits happen only when there’s an actual reason for them.
That’s how we ensure our clients get a personal and human-led service.
In-house project management
Eventually, you may decide to redecorate your space, or your property might need some renovation, whether due to damage or wear and tear.
If your residence management company doesn’t offer project management, you’d have two choices.
You could either manage the project yourself, or find a contractor to do it for you. If you go for the second option, you’d have to ensure they coordinate with your property management company. Otherwise, they’d be in each other’s way, which would affect the quality of work you’d receive from both.
It would be simpler if you had one service provider—someone you relied on and trusted—to handle it all.
For example, we have a list of vetted contractors who can carry out renovation, refurbishment, and maintenance tasks with the level of care your prime or super-prime home deserves. That is if the task cannot be completed by our own team, of course.
We also know enough about building regulations to know when to apply for permissions and approvals, and when to just proceed with the work. Our property project management service is designed to handle it all for you.
Flexibility
Even if you have signed up with a property management company, you may decide quite early on that you’re not quite happy with its staff’s performance. In such a case, you should be able to part ways.
Unfortunately, you may find that you’re locked into an annual contract and must stay with them for that period. So, even though you’d rather find another company, you’ll be obliged to continue with their services until the contract runs out.
To avoid being stuck in this situation, you should ideally look for a company without a lock-in period. For instance, we don’t bind our clients to a contract. They can terminate our services at any time in the first three months. Subsequently, they simply need to give us two months’ notice.
As clients aren’t forced to retain us, we have the pleasure of working with people who actually appreciate our services.
No onboarding fee
A luxury property management company should consider it an honour to work with you, not the other way around.
What do we mean by that?
Certain companies charge an onboarding fee, covering setup costs, on top of their monthly rates. In essence, they want you to pay for the privilege of working with them.
In truth, this fee is often quite unnecessary, especially when taking a long-term view of the relationship.
In truth, this fee is often quite unnecessary, especially when taking a long-term view of the relationship.
Partner with the right property management company for your luxury home or rental properties in London
At The London Management Company, we’re known for our high-end services that facilitate our clients’ lifestyles and take care of their needs discreetly and unobtrusively.
- Property management
- Maintenance
- Concierge and lifestyle management
- Staff management
- Accounting
- Window cleaning
- Pressure washing
- In-house housekeeping and cleaning teams
- In-house maintenance team
Your dedicated property manager will ensure that everything is exactly as you’d like, so you can sit back and relax. You and your home get the five-star treatment at an extremely competitive price. We do give you the freedom to terminate our services whenever you want, but considering our reputation, you won’t want to.
Do you need a trustworthy, reliable, and proactive property management company to manage your luxury home in London, Surrey, New York or their surrounding areas?