How we hold occupancy above 98% across close to 300 units
Most letting agents will tell you they minimise voids. Almost none will tell you how. So here’s ours, in full — including the parts that are unglamorous and the parts that don’t always work.
Most letting agents will tell you they minimise voids. Almost none will tell you how.
So here’s ours, in full. Not the marketing version — the actual operating method we use across close to 300 units in West and South West London, including the parts that are unglamorous and the parts that don’t always work.
We’re publishing it for a straightforward reason. If you’re deciding whether to hand someone your property, the useful question isn’t whether they claim to be good. It’s whether they can describe what they do precisely enough that you could check it — and whether they’ll show you the number while it’s moving. The occupancy figure on our homepage is live. It updates in real time, and it goes down as well as up.
The principle: a void is a scheduling failure, not a market condition
Almost every void we’ve ever caused — and we’ve caused plenty — traces back to the same thing. Somebody waited.
Waited until the keys came back before putting it on Rightmove — throwing away the eight weeks of notice the tenant had just handed over. Waited nine days for a photographer, in a market where the first ten days of a listing draw most of the enquiries you’ll ever get. Waited on a gas engineer, because nobody noticed the certificate had lapsed in March. Waited to see whether the outgoing tenant might change their mind, and lost the applicant who’d have signed on the Saturday.
None of those feel like decisions at the time. Each one is a week, and four of them is a month’s rent.
The market is rarely the problem. London’s rental market has rebalanced over the past eighteen months and is more competitive for landlords than it was at the 2023 peak, but properties still let. The average London property takes around twenty days to let. Most of that is process, not demand.
Everything below follows from that.
The method, in six parts
Notice triggers marketing. Move-out triggers nothing.
The moment a tenant gives notice, the room goes live. Not when they leave. Not when it’s been cleaned. That day.
Under the new periodic regime a tenant must give two months’ written notice, so notice hands us roughly eight weeks of runway. We treat that runway as the asset it is. In a normal turnover the incoming tenant has been referenced and has a move-in date before the outgoing tenant has packed.
This is the single highest-value change on this list, and it costs nothing. It’s just a decision about when to start.
We market from a database, not a listing.
Every enquiry we’ve ever had stays on our system, tagged by area, budget, room type and when they were looking.
When a room comes up, the first thing that happens isn’t a portal listing. It’s a check against people who’ve enquired before — the ones who liked a property but the timing was wrong, the ones who took a room elsewhere on a six-month basis, the existing tenants who want to move within the portfolio.
Alongside that sits a second channel most operators don’t have: long-standing relationships with major London employers who send us their incoming staff directly. Young professionals relocating to the city arrive needing somewhere good to live, from an employer that already knows us. That demand doesn’t depend on a listing, doesn’t dry up when the seasonal market slows, and arrives already part-referenced.
A meaningful share of our lets never reach a portal at all. Those are the fastest ones, because the person on the other end already knows the standard of the property and has already been through referencing.
Compliance is tracked forward, never chased backward.
Every property and room in our portfolio carries its compliance record with expiry dates attached: gas safety, EICR, HMO licensing, fire safety, deposit protection, and everything else that carries a renewal date. Renewals are booked ahead of expiry as a matter of routine, not triggered by a let.
This sounds like housekeeping. It is actually void prevention. The most common avoidable delay in the industry is discovering a lapsed certificate at the point of letting, and then losing ten days to a contractor’s diary. We don’t have that problem because nothing is ever discovered — it’s all already scheduled.
Since the Renters’ Rights Act removed Section 21, this matters more than it did. Compliance gaps that were once administrative irritations now sit in the middle of the possession process.
Technology does the transactional work. People do the judgement.
Our operations run on our own centralised system rather than a set of inboxes. Enquiries, viewings, referencing, maintenance reports, contractor jobs, rent, certificates — all logged against the property and the room, all visible in one place.
Acknowledgement and initial handling of enquiries, viewing scheduling, referencing progress-chasing, contractor follow-up, certificate reminders, rent monitoring, arrears flagging.
Anything involving a judgement about a person. Whether an applicant is right for a house. How to handle a dispute between sharers. What to tell a landlord when something has gone wrong. Whether a maintenance issue is genuinely urgent.
The point of automating the transactional layer isn’t to remove people. It’s to stop people spending their day on chasing, so their attention is available for the fifteen per cent of situations that genuinely need it.
Maintenance is triaged the day it’s reported.
Every maintenance report is logged, categorised and either dispatched or scheduled on the day it arrives. Contractors are assigned and tracked to completion automatically. Anything that stalls escalates to a person.
We do this because it’s the right way to treat tenants, and also because it is the cheapest income protection available. A tenant who has had two repairs handled quickly is a tenant who renews. Under periodic tenancies — where nothing contractually holds anybody in place — that’s no longer a soft benefit. It’s the mechanism by which occupancy stays high.
Turnaround has a deliberate, short overlap.
Between a move-out and a move-in we allow a small planned window for cleaning, inventory and any works — measured in days, not weeks. Contractors are booked before the outgoing tenant leaves, against a condition report taken at the pre-move-out inspection.
Check-in and check-out run through our own in-house app. Condition and photographs are captured room by room at both ends, which means we see what needs doing before the keys come back rather than after — and the incoming tenant walks into a room that’s ready, with a record of its condition already logged. It also removes most of what makes deposit disputes drag on, because the evidence exists from day one rather than being assembled from memory.
The difference between a two-day turnaround and a two-week one is almost entirely whether the work was booked in advance.
The number, and why it’s harder than it looks
98% occupancy on a single-family let means very little. One tenant, one tenancy, one gap every couple of years. Hold a property for two years, lose four weeks between tenants, and you’ve achieved 96% without having done anything at all.
Room-by-room co-living is a different exercise. Our rooms change hands many times more often than a whole-house let, which means we run the re-letting process hundreds of times a year rather than once every two — and every single one of those is an opportunity to lose a fortnight. Holding above 98% across that volume isn’t the same achievement as holding it across a handful of long tenancies. It’s the harder version, repeated continuously, all year.
These are the measures we actually run the business on:
We publish these because they’re the questions worth asking of any operator, and because most can’t answer them. An agent who can’t tell you their average time-to-let doesn’t measure it, and an operation that doesn’t measure it can’t improve it.
What it doesn’t mean
None of the above means we never have a void. We do — an awkward room, an unusually quiet January, a tenant who leaves without notice. The difference is that ours are counted in days rather than weeks, and we know exactly which properties produce them and why.
It also doesn’t transfer automatically. A single-family let behaves differently from a room in a shared house, and anyone quoting you a portfolio-wide occupancy figure as a promise about your specific property is selling, not managing.
What it does tell you is what happens to a property once it sits inside an operation built for this — and that is the part you can actually buy.
Why we’re telling you all this
Because none of it is proprietary. There’s no secret in this article. Every point above is available to any landlord willing to be disciplined about it — and if you read this, apply it yourself and never speak to us again, that’s a good outcome.
What’s hard isn’t knowing the method. It’s doing it on a Tuesday in November when a boiler has failed, two applicants have dropped out and a certificate is due. Consistency at scale is the actual product. That’s what we’ve spent years building, and it’s what you’re paying for if you work with us.
If you’d rather own a rental property than run one — a fixed rent every month, no voids to manage, no calls on a Sunday — that’s what working with us looks like. Get in touch and we’ll tell you quickly whether your property is one we’d take on.
Find out what your property is worth to us
A fixed rent every month, no voids to manage, no calls on a Sunday. We’ll tell you quickly whether your property is one we’d take on.
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