What a letting agency can outsource, and what it should not

Almost everything published about outsourcing for letting agents is written by a firm that sells outsourcing, which is why it reads the way it does. We sell it too, so read this with the same caution. The difference we can offer is a list that includes the work we would decline, and the reasons, because taking the wrong work off an agency is how this industry earns its bad stories.

What travels well

The work that moves successfully has a shape. It recurs, it follows a procedure, its deadlines are dates rather than moods, and its quality can be checked by someone who was not in the room. Four families of agency work have that shape.

• Tenancy administration: referencing coordination, the pre-tenancy document trail, deposit registration, renewals administration where the tenancy still has one, and the serving and evidencing of statutory documents.
• The compliance calendar: gas safety, electrical reports, energy certificates, smoke and carbon monoxide records, licensing renewals — a diary of statutory dates that fails quietly when it lives in a negotiator’s spare time.
• Accounts support: reconciliation preparation, invoice matching, arrears chasing at the polite letter stage, statement production — the administrative capacity behind your client accounting, with the regulated arrangements themselves staying exactly where they are.
• Sales progression: chasing the chain, the searches, the mortgage offer and the solicitors, on a file that is updated the moment something happens rather than when someone remembers.

What should not leave the building

Valuations and instructions. Negotiation. The conversation with a landlord who is angry, or grieving, or about to leave. Anything where the answer is a judgment about a person rather than a procedure about a file. And the formal custody of client money: our people can prepare and reconcile, but the regulated client-money arrangements, the scheme membership and the accountability stay with the agency, because that is where the law and your professional body put them.

There is also a category that travels technically but should not travel first. If a process is broken, moving it moves the breakage somewhere harder to see. The right order is to write the process down properly, fix what the writing-down exposes, and only then hand it to anybody, including us.

When we assess an engagement, that shape test is the whole of the first conversation. Work that passes it gets a named administrator, a written procedure built by watching your best person do the job, and deadlines reported against dates. Work that fails it, we say so, and the saying-so early is cheaper for everybody than the discovering-so later.

The list of what your own agency should keep is not fixed either. It is a function of your people, your systems and your stock, which is why the first month of any engagement here is spent mapping rather than moving.

Ejas Deane is a partner of the firm. He answers enquiries himself.