You’ve put in the hours, battled on the pitch, and with a professional, even bullish, presentation, you’ve secured the keys to that building. As a property, facilities, agent, or asset manager, you’re accountable to the board of institutional investors. Your extensive experience in property management, from legislation and compliance to procurement and block management, gives you unwavering confidence in your ability to deliver. Your track record speaks for itself.
But let’s be honest, while you’re a veteran in these areas, your marketing skillset is, to put it mildly, limited. Perhaps you’ve entrusted it to an intern at HQ who’s never even heard of Sheffield, let alone visited. You’ve collectively and foolishly believed that a previous marketing plan, successful in a far less competitive market (where even “chimps could let property”), would work again. However, as you’re about to discover, Sheffield is unique. Supply is vastly outstripping demand, and the construction train is full steam ahead.
You’ve done little more than blow the dust off the keys, attach a bland company keyring, and attempt to manage from a distance. You’ve failed to invest in crucial web visibility, clinging to an outdated website, and then committed the cardinal sin of relying on manual property listings on portals. What a colossal mistake! At best, you’ve asked a colleague at HQ to haphazardly post a few social messages or put up some poorly designed signage around the development.
As the competition intensifies with more and more developments emerging, your enquiry levels inevitably plummet. Panic sets in. You start questioning your on-site lettings team, wondering why they aren’t converting leads, forgetting they aren’t magicians who can conjure tenants out of thin air.
By letting projections nowhere near your initial presentation to the board, you’re under immense pressure. You fire up the metaphorical unicycle—because you’re essentially on your own—and head down the road to commercial suicide. Desperate, you instruct the lettings team to offer incentives: a free month’s rent, free car parking, free Wi-Fi, even a Waitrose voucher. You’re prepared to sell your soul in a frantic attempt to deflect from the glaring truth: despite being a capable facilities management company, your (or your team’s) marketing plan utterly sucks.
Days turn into weeks, then months, and finally quarters. Now you’re under the microscope of the super troopers—the fund managers, likely headquartered in London—who begin to question if they’ve backed the right horse. When you first pitched to win this business, you clearly did little more than a site visit, relied on an overpriced desktop study to produce a report, and thought, as we’d say in Sheffield, “I’ll be Reyt.”
The heat from “the big smoke” (London) becomes unbearable. They start making decisions for you, bypassing you on operational details and liaising directly with the “coal face.” This not only undermines the FM’s role but also confuses the team, who no longer know who to report to. It’s a bit like His Highness Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan trying to give Manchester City’s team talk. You get the gist.
The Road to Financial Ruin: The Rise of “Tenant-Finding” Vultures
With the Facilities Manager sidelined and the fund acutely aware of their marketing shortfalls, the situation escalates from commercial suicide to a full-blown financial autobahn. What unfolds next defies financial comprehension.
This is when the “tenant-finding” vultures begin to circle, preying on the vulnerable. They bypass the FM entirely, approaching the fund directly with promises of magically generating new enquiries for struggling developments through their slick, remote call centre operations. The fund, desperate, succumbs to the hype, drops its guard, and commissions these “Find a Tenant” companies on a performance basis – typically “No Let, No Fee.”
These companies often charge around £1,200 plus VAT per tenant, invoicing only upon physical occupancy. While this might seem like a solid business model, anyone with an ounce of acumen should immediately question it. This scenario perfectly illustrates desperate people doing desperate things. Let me explain why.
A critical question that should be asked during their pitch, but clearly isn’t, is: “How can a remote ‘Find a Tenant’ operator generate enquiries that we can’t?”
The answer is deceptively simple: they duplicate your listings across multiple property portals like Rightmove, Zoopla, and OnTheMarket. They not only brand these listings with their own logo but also use AI to craft new descriptions.
In reality, you end up competing against yourself. It’s like Mike Tyson stepping into the ring against Mike Tyson – it makes no sense. Many of these enquiries will be duplicates, meaning you could end up paying a hefty commission for a tenant you would have acquired anyway.
For these unscrupulous companies, it’s merely a numbers game. They have no loyalty and will readily strike deals with other struggling developments, knowing that if they cast a wide enough net, something will stick. They might represent several developments simultaneously. If a viewing isn’t successful for one property, they simply offer another. We have physical evidence of them marketing other developments that were never even enquired about initially.
Consider the math: after qualifying an opportunity based on suitability and affordability, they arrange viewings at multiple developments. They know the prospective tenant will likely choose one from the three, four, or five properties they’ve seen. “Kerching!” – that’s another £1,200 of easy money for them.
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This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents in this article are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.
