There's a particular kind of nostalgia in estate agency that I find increasingly difficult to understand. It usually comes from someone who's been in the industry for a few decades, remembers how things used to work and confidently announces that we managed perfectly well before all this technology came along. The implication is that modern property managers have become overly dependent on software, and that a decent filing system, a telephone and a bit of common sense ought to be enough to run a successful business.
It's a lovely thought, but it conveniently ignores the fact that the job we're doing today bears very little resemblance to the job we were doing twenty-five years ago. Back then, a landlord's compliance responsibilities were considerably simpler. A gas safety certificate was one of the relatively few formal requirements that most agents routinely needed to manage, and the volume of information that needed to be recorded, communicated and retained was a fraction of what we deal with today. Comparing the two is a bit like suggesting that an airline should be able to operate with the same systems it used in the 1970s because the planes still have wings.
Today, we're operating within a vast and increasingly interconnected framework of legislation, safety standards, documentation requirements, consumer protections and obligations to investigate and respond to problems. The uncomfortable truth is that modern property management has become extraordinarily complicated, and while we spend a great deal of time discussing whether agents understand their legal responsibilities, I'm not convinced we spend nearly enough time asking whether their businesses are actually structured to deliver them. Knowing what needs to be done and having the operational capacity to do it consistently, accurately and profitably are two very different things.
The property manager's job has changed beyond recognition
When I sat down with Ed Mead for The Viking Chats, we discussed the growing demands being placed on property businesses and the practical challenge of delivering them. Ed has spent decades in agency, including helping to build Douglas & Gordon, before founding Viewber, which provides access to a nationwide network of people who can carry out property-related tasks. What makes his perspective particularly interesting is that he's seen the problem from both sides. He understands how traditional agencies operate, but he's also spent years building a business around the idea that not every physical task needs to be carried out by an agency's own employees.
Property managers aren't simply arranging repairs, collecting rent and dealing with the occasional difficult conversation anymore. They're increasingly expected to maintain detailed records, coordinate inspections, monitor safety obligations, document complaints, follow up on hazards and demonstrate that appropriate action was taken at the appropriate time. The Housing Health and Safety Rating System already provides a framework for assessing hazards in residential properties, while wider reforms concerning property standards and damp and mould are adding further complexity to the operating environment. Whatever the precise implementation timetable of individual measures, the direction is unmistakable: agents and landlords need increasingly robust systems for identifying, managing and evidencing their responsibilities.
The problem is that every new responsibility creates work, often across several stages. Somebody has to identify the requirement, establish when it applies, arrange the necessary activity, communicate with the relevant parties, collect the evidence, review the result, deal with any follow-up and retain an accessible record. Multiply that across a portfolio of several hundred properties, each with different characteristics, occupiers, contractors, risks and histories, and the sheer volume becomes obvious. There simply aren't enough hours in the day to manage all of that manually, provide an excellent service to tenants and landlords, and still operate a commercially viable business. Not unless you've discovered some remarkable way of making time work differently from the rest of us.
And this is where I think the industry sometimes misunderstands the problem. We talk about training property managers to be better organised, more knowledgeable and more efficient, as though the answer is simply to expect more from people who are already working incredibly hard. Of course, technical competence matters enormously, and nobody should be managing people's homes without understanding the responsibilities involved. But no amount of personal organisation can overcome an operating model that requires one person to perform hundreds of repetitive administrative activities alongside the genuinely complex work that demands their expertise.
Where a human adds no value, they only add risk
I've used a particular mantra for years, and the more complicated our industry becomes, the more firmly I believe in it: where a human adds no value to a process, all they add is risk. I appreciate that this can sound rather harsh, particularly in an industry built around personal relationships, but it's worth examining what it actually means. I'm not suggesting that people are unnecessary or that technology should be allowed to make every decision. Quite the opposite. I believe we're wasting some of our best people by asking them to spend so much of their working lives doing things that don't benefit from human involvement.
Consider booking a routine inspection. Somebody needs to identify that it's due, contact the tenant, arrange a suitable appointment and ensure the details are recorded. Or take uploading a gas safety certificate, distributing a moving-out guide or issuing a standard reminder. These tasks are important, and getting them wrong can have serious consequences, but the successful outcome isn't improved because an experienced property manager personally clicks the buttons. They're fundamentally binary activities: the inspection is booked correctly or it isn't, the document is uploaded and associated with the right property or it isn't, and the information is sent to the appropriate person at the right time or it isn't.
Having a human manually perform each step doesn't automatically make the outcome more personal or more professional. It introduces the possibility of forgetting, mistyping, misfiling, becoming distracted or simply running out of time, while consuming the attention of someone whose knowledge and judgement could be making a genuine difference elsewhere. Now consider what happens when that inspection identifies a potential damp problem. Suddenly, we're in entirely different territory. We need to understand the building, assess what might be causing the issue, consider the tenant's circumstances, decide what expertise is required and determine how urgently the matter needs to be addressed. That's a situation requiring judgement, experience, communication and accountability, and it's precisely where I want my best people spending their time.
The distinction isn't between important and unimportant work. Some of the most critical compliance activities involve straightforward administration that absolutely must happen, and the systems responsible for those tasks need to be monitored and checked. The distinction is between work where a person can materially improve the outcome and work where they cannot. If we get that distinction right, technology stops being something we bolt onto an existing agency structure and becomes the foundation around which we design the business.
Stop building agencies around administrative work
If I were starting a property management business from scratch today, I wouldn't begin by hiring a team, dividing up the portfolio and then looking for software to make everyone a little more productive. I'd start by examining every activity involved in managing a property, from the first instruction through to the conclusion of the tenancy, and asking a simple question: where does human involvement genuinely improve the result? Only once I'd established that would I begin designing the operational structure, because I think we've spent far too long allowing the limitations of traditional agency models to dictate how we use technology.
Where human involvement doesn't add meaningful value, I'd look at how technology, AI, integrations or specialist partners could deliver that activity reliably. Where it does, I'd invest in finding exceptional people and giving them the time, information and authority to do it properly. That might mean automated scheduling, document handling and routine communications, or integrating specialist providers to deliver physical inspections and other clearly defined services, with appropriate oversight and quality controls. It would certainly mean eliminating the absurd situation where the same information is repeatedly typed into different systems by different people, each introducing another opportunity for something to go wrong.
Ed's experience with Viewber illustrates the opportunity rather well. His original idea was partly about helping agencies accommodate viewings outside conventional working hours, but the model found particular traction in sectors such as property auctions, where geographically dispersed portfolios made it difficult and expensive to send employees to every property. The lesson isn't that every agency should outsource its viewings, but that the conventional assumptions about who must perform a task, where they must be based and how that work must be organised are worth challenging. Once you stop treating the traditional agency structure as inevitable, some rather interesting possibilities begin to emerge.
Of course, none of this means handing your business over to a collection of software subscriptions and hoping for the best. Automation needs monitoring, integrations fail, instructions can be misunderstood and processes that worked brilliantly last month can become unsuitable when requirements change. A crucial part of building a technology-led agency would be continually reviewing how those systems perform, adjusting their configuration and challenging the underlying methodology whenever necessary. The better the technology becomes, the more important it is that someone understands what it's supposed to achieve and can recognise when it isn't doing so.
Your people still need to know the properties
There's a risk that this argument gets interpreted as a call to turn property managers into remote administrators who rarely see the homes they're responsible for. Nothing could be further from what I believe, and I'd actually argue that firsthand knowledge of the properties in your portfolio becomes more important as you automate more of the routine work. Technology should give your people the capacity to understand their buildings better, rather than providing an excuse for them to become increasingly detached from the assets they're managing.
A good property manager should understand the homes they're responsible for in considerable detail. They should know the age and condition of the building, its recurring maintenance issues, the history of significant repairs, the landlord's priorities and the circumstances that might make a particular problem more urgent or complicated. That knowledge is what allows someone to interpret information intelligently rather than merely process it, and it's especially important when dealing with issues that don't have a simple, standardised answer.
A report of condensation in one property might suggest a relatively straightforward issue, while a similar report in another could be the first indication of a longstanding building defect. A property manager who knows both buildings is in a much stronger position to ask the right questions, recognise the risks and coordinate an appropriate response. Technology can bring the information together, prompt the necessary steps and preserve the evidence, but it cannot replace the responsibility to understand what that evidence means. I want property managers spending more time getting to know their buildings, talking to tenants, inspecting the quality of work, advising landlords and making decisions that protect the asset and the people living in it, rather than spending half their working lives moving information from one digital filing cabinet to another.
This is also why I think the best technology-led agencies could become particularly attractive places to work. Imagine recruiting talented people into a business where they aren't expected to spend their days chasing certificates, copying data, arranging routine appointments and sending repetitive emails. Instead, they're trusted to build meaningful relationships, develop technical expertise, understand their portfolio and solve interesting problems. That sounds like a considerably more rewarding career to me, and I suspect it would appeal to exactly the kind of people our industry should be trying harder to attract and retain.
Compliance isn't an add-on. It's much of what we're paid to do.
There's another uncomfortable conversation we need to have, this time with landlords. Many still think the principal value of a letting agent is finding a tenant, and while finding the right tenant is certainly important, it's often one of the more straightforward parts of the entire relationship when everything is done properly. The real work comes afterwards, as the property needs to be maintained, risks identified, obligations managed and relationships handled over what could be many years.
Modern managing agents are, to a significant extent, asset and risk managers. We're responsible for helping landlords navigate a complicated framework of obligations while protecting the condition, value and long-term viability of their investment. We're also dealing with people's homes, which means our decisions can have a very direct impact on their safety, wellbeing and quality of life. Yet much of the work that makes good management valuable is almost invisible when it's being done well, because the whole point of effective management is often that problems are prevented rather than allowed to become emergencies.
The tenant receives the appropriate information, relevant checks happen when they're supposed to, a potential problem is identified before it becomes a crisis, and a contractor is followed up when necessary. A complaint is documented and handled, while a landlord receives advice before making a decision that could expose them to unnecessary risk. None of this necessarily produces a dramatic moment that makes the client think how wonderful their agent is, but the cumulative effect of getting hundreds of small things right is enormously important.
This creates a commercial problem. If landlords don't understand the complexity of what's happening behind the scenes, it's easy for them to look at a competitor offering management at half the fee and wonder why they're paying more. The cheaper service might be perfectly capable of delivering what it promises, but it might equally be leaving out significant activities that the landlord doesn't know to ask about. A fee comparison tells you very little unless you understand what work is included, how it is delivered and who remains accountable when something goes wrong.
That's why educating landlords matters, although I don't mean bombarding them with legislative updates or treating them as though they're incapable of understanding their responsibilities. People employ managing agents because they want somebody else to take care of things, and that's entirely reasonable. But being hands-off shouldn't mean being unaware of the value being delivered. We need to become much better at explaining the work that protects their investment and why it matters, without turning every routine compliance activity into another tedious email.
The agencies that win will rethink the entire model
For years, technology in agency was largely sold as a way to save time or reduce headcount. Those can be legitimate commercial outcomes, but I think they miss the more exciting opportunity, which is to create businesses where excellent people can consistently deliver excellent service without being buried under repetitive administration. That requires more than buying software, because the systems, people, suppliers and operating methods all need to work together as a coherent whole.
There is still a cost to building and maintaining that infrastructure. Businesses need to choose suppliers carefully, configure their systems intelligently, train their teams and continually review whether the processes are working. Technology isn't a magic wand, and buying more of it without changing how the business operates can simply create another layer of complexity. But the alternative is increasingly difficult to defend, because we cannot keep adding responsibilities to an operating model built for a much simpler era and expect property managers to absorb the difference through goodwill, longer hours and increasingly heroic levels of organisation.
The agencies that thrive won't necessarily be those with the most employees or the biggest technology budgets. They'll be the ones that understand precisely where their people create value, build reliable systems around everything else and retain the expertise to oversee the whole operation. Compliance is no longer something that sits alongside property management, because it's woven through virtually everything we do. The challenge now is to design businesses capable of delivering those responsibilities properly while giving talented people the freedom to do the work that only talented people can do.
And if we manage that, I think we'll discover that technology hasn't made agency less human at all. Quite the opposite: by removing the work that never needed a human in the first place, we'll finally have the capacity to deliver the sort of personal, knowledgeable and attentive service that our clients and tenants deserve.
