Insights
Insights
Occasional writing on how this work should be done. Each piece carries the name of the partner who wrote it.
All insights
20 August 2026 · Ejas Deane
Client accounting: outsource it, ringfence it, or staff it?
The one part of a lettings operation where the regulated arrangements matter more than the workload. The three honest structures, and where a firm like ours does and does not belong in them.
20 August 2026 · Ejas Deane
How many properties can one property manager actually manage?
The most-asked staffing question in lettings has no published answer, because the honest answer is not a number. Here is the framework that produces yours.
20 August 2026 · Ejas Deane
The named-person test
One question separates the two kinds of outsourcing sold to agencies: can you name the person who did your work yesterday? What the answer predicts, and what dedicated should mean in a contract.
20 August 2026 · Ejas Deane
Pay-per-exchange, or a progressor on your team?
Sales progression has a specialist market with a clear pricing model, and the model is right for some agencies and wrong for others. The economics of the choice, without a villain.
20 August 2026 · Ejas Deane
The compliance calendar a dedicated administrator runs
A managed portfolio is a set of statutory dates before it is anything else. What the recurring calendar actually contains, and why it fails when it lives in a negotiator’s spare time.
20 August 2026 · Ejas Deane
Recruiting a lettings administrator in 2026: the market you are hiring into
Before comparing providers, or deciding to hire at all, it is worth seeing the labour market as it actually is. The trade press has been documenting it for two years; here is the record, assembled.
20 August 2026 · Ejas Deane
What a letting agency can outsource, and what it should not
Most writing on this subject is produced by people selling the answer. Here is the sober version: which parts of an agency travel well, which parts should never leave the building, and the test that separates them.
20 August 2026 · Ejas Deane
The real cost of a lettings administrator
The salary pages tell you what the role advertises at. They do not do the arithmetic an employer actually pays. Here it is, line by line, with our own number set against it for you to test.
20 August 2026 · Ejas Deane
India, the Philippines, South Africa — or an hour ahead
The destinations that serve British agencies are genuinely different, and the differences are mostly not the ones the brochures argue about. A fair comparison, including the parts that do not favour us.
20 August 2026 · Ejas Deane
Nearshore is an operational word, not a geographic one
The software industry owns the nearshore-versus-offshore argument and has settled it for code. Nobody has answered it for agency work, where the test is not the map but the telephone.
20 August 2026 · Ejas Deane
When the outsourcer fails: what 2021 should have taught the lettings market
The largest white-label lettings outsourcer in Britain ceased trading in September 2021, with agencies’ books inside it. The lesson was structural, and most of the market has not acted on it.
21 July 2026 · Ejas Deane
The How to Rent guide was withdrawn, and much of the industry has not noticed
Three months into the Renters’ Rights Act, the compliance pack most agents were handed is out of date. Here is what actually has to be served now, and what has to be provable.
9 July 2026 · Egzon Hallaçi
The work nobody wrote down is the work that breaks first
Most administrative operations run on knowledge that exists in one person’s head. That is fine until the day it is not, and it is the single commonest reason a handover fails.
6 July 2026 · Egzon Hallaçi
Working on your credentials does not avoid a data transfer
The most attractive sentence available to a firm like ours would also be wrong. Here is what UK GDPR actually says about remote access, and what we hand you instead.