Ten Flats, One Conversation

Portfolio landlords rarely set out to become administrators. A first flat becomes a second, a remortgage funds a third, and a decade later there are eight or ten properties across two cities, each with its own tenancy, agent, deposit, certificate renewal and evening phone call. The income is real. So is the time.

We work with a number of landlords in this position, and the arrangement is simple to describe: their flats come to us under one agreement, and they receive one income and one point of contact in return. This is how it works and what it changes.

The portfolio problem

A scattered portfolio has a specific inefficiency. Each flat carries fixed effort regardless of its rent: compliance, inspections, tenant changes, rent reviews and, since the Renters’ Rights Act took effect this spring, a slower and narrower route to possession when a tenancy needs to end. Ten flats means ten of everything. Letting agents help, but each one is still a separate relationship with a separate fee and a separate opinion.

Consolidation is the obvious answer, and selling is the blunt way to do it. There is a gentler way.

One agreement for the whole portfolio

We take flats on a company lease, as a limited company hosting our own guests. The agreement is a commercial contract rather than an assured tenancy; there is no individual tenant to manage, and no possession question at the end of the term. A portfolio can come across under one master agreement with a schedule of properties, or under matching agreements per flat with the same terms. Either way, the owner deals with one counterparty.

Two structures, and hybrids

The guaranteed company lease fixes the rent for a term of between three and fifteen years, paid monthly, occupied or not. The operational risk is ours.

The revenue-share partnership keeps the owner exposed to trading performance, with full management included and a share of revenue in place of a fixed rent.

We present both because different portfolios and different owners want different things, and a blend is often the answer: a guaranteed floor across the portfolio with a share above it, or a fixed rent on some flats and a share on others. We would rather set the options out plainly than tell you which to take.

What we do with the flats

Each apartment is furnished to our standard, calm, material-honest, designed for monthly stays, and hosted for guests who stay a month or more: professionals on placement, families between homes, patients attending clinics, academics, touring companies. Housekeeping is by insured professional companies in each city; maintenance is coordinated by our property management partner; inspections are constant because our guests expect a hotel standard and we expect it for them.

We do not alter the fabric of a property. Fittings stay as they are unless we agree otherwise with you. What you get back at the end of the term is your flat, usually in better condition than it went in, because monthly guests are fewer, calmer and more careful than the alternatives.

What the owner keeps

Ownership, obviously, and with it the capital growth and the choice of what to do at the end of the term. Also a good deal of time. Owners tell us the quiet is the thing they notice first: the phone stops ringing about boilers, and the income arrives on the same day each month.

For owners thinking in decades

A portfolio is often held for reasons beyond yield: family, succession, a sense of having built something. A long company lease sits comfortably with that horizon. It turns a set of properties into a predictable income stream that can be planned around, borrowed against or passed on without the operational load passing with it. We are not advisers, and structuring is a conversation for your own accountant and solicitor, but we have found that owners who think long-term tend to like the shape of what we offer.

Where we host

London’s Fitzrovia and Marylebone, and Oxford, with a preference for well-connected addresses where monthly stays are in steady demand. We will consider portfolios in other cities where the demand is there.

The quiet question

If you own several flats and would like to keep them, keep the income and lose the administration, send us the list. We will visit, take a view and come back within a fortnight with a proposal under one or both structures. The conversation costs nothing.

Partner with The INVITED — guaranteed rent or revenue share, full management, design uplift. Get in touch.