Paul Rowland
Director and Team Leader
P
Rachel Atkins
Senior Block Manager And Team Leader
R
Julian Foster
Block Manager
J
Martin Nolan
Maintenance Crew
M
Mick O'Hanlon
Inspections and Maintenance Crew
M
Carlos Souza
Cleaning and Gardening Crew
C
Kwame Slaw
Block Manager
K
Sanaa Amzile
Block Manager
MW
What we do
We manage residential or mixed blocks and estates from 10 to 100’s of units. Geographically, we want to be able to reach the property within an hour of our office, so we generally won’t take on an instruction further East than London Bridge or further North than Camden. We have a large portfolio in and around Richmond, but we’re able to help with anything Central, West and South West.
We have a skilled in-house maintenance team with project managers and hands on property managers. We have a huge combined experience of difficult problem solving in a large variety of buildings. We thrive when a building requires a real hands-on approach. We know of no other block management company with the same amount of problem solving skill and knowledge in house – elsewhere this is generally outsourced and we find this can slow things down and make it more expensive.
Our team work together combining administrative skills and practical hands-on skills to deliver a valuable and efficient service.
We are able to provide property management services to property developers, freeholders, right to manage companies, share-of-freeholders, institutional investors, administrators/receivers, Housing Associations and Councils.
Whilst many management agents outsource maintenance, we have our own in-house maintenance team which means we can guarantee the quality of work carried out on your property.
Our hands-on property management team conducts regular onsite inspections to ensure that the properties we manage are kept and maintained to a high standard.
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New Instructions
As changing block managers usually takes time and involves a lot of people, we understand that there is necessarily a lot of window shopping at the beginning. The first step in the process for potential new clients therefore is an initial indicative quote from us.
We use our own pricing model which is based on the estimated hours for us to manage the building in a year. This means that smaller, more complex buildings may cost more to manage than a larger simpler ones. There are about 80 separate points of time allocation which we factor into the price and we apply a logarithmic curve as the buildings get larger. So we don’t price per unit. This quote is generally valid for six months.
As and when the building has decided to make a change, then we welcome video calls to discuss the building and answer questions, where we can demonstrate systems and/or a site visit. However, please note that we get a lot of requests for speculative meetings and we can’t huge time to these because existing clients and workload will always be our priority. So meetings and site visits are preferred once the intention to change is confirmed.
If you decide to make a change to Acara, then you would serve a notice to terminate your existing arrangement, triggering a handover to us and this normally takes three months. We can do this quicker, but this is the industry norm.
We usually cap onboarding to two properties a month, so there may be a waiting list, or phased onboarding.
Tenders
We will occasionally participate in a formal tender, but will usually turn these down. Whilst we appreciate the reason for tenders – they are incredibly time consuming with a necessary element of jumping through hoops and pitting multiple parties against each other making those several hours work a statistical or probable waste of time. As we generally already have a waiting list of new clients and lots of existing work that will take priority – tenders are pretty off-putting and we prefer a quote and exploratory meeting for new clients.
The block management service includes;
A central point of contact and information for leaseholders and residents using our bespoke Slack and Trello task management platforms.
Management and maintenance of the cleanliness, tidiness and upkeep of the communal parts and fabric of the building, plant and grounds.
Emergency works
Arrangement of insurance
Seeing to fire safety and health and safety compliance
Site inspections
Service charge budget administration
Payment collection and service charge holding
Payment of outgoings for the building
Arrears chasing
Reporting
Submission of notices
Company Secretary and registered office
Hands-on Property Managers
Maintenance/Management Combined
Local and Friendly
Tenancy Management Too
Get In Touch
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Get in touch