Operations Strategy and Opportunities

  • Management of staff, HR & payroll
  • Resident Portal (Yardi Concierge or Building Link) - Allsop can either maintain the Building Link system or upgrade to Yardi, this will not only provide greater functionality but reduce overhead for the scheme as we do not recharge licence costs.
  • Health and safety (RiskWise) - Improved visibility and greater functionality. Client will have live data.
  • Telephony costs at site appear very high, Allsop leverage our M365 backbone to reduce costs and operate notional phone lines across both mobile and laptops reducing the need for landline spend.
  • Lettings and coordination of all marketing - Revenue Management through active Asset Management
  • Rent Cafe portal marketing - Improved SEO and PPC performance as a result of Rent Cafe product.
  • Vetting and leasing - Allsop have a specialist and dedicated Credit Control department.
  • Facilitation of check in / out / inventories - we note at present Inventories are outsourced at significant cost. This would be brought in house into the team. Potentially with additional head count but certainly at reduced cost.
  • Homeviews costs appear very high, we leverage our portfolio size to negotiate a better rate and do not add any markup. This would be reduced significantly.
  • We believe the Rightmove subscription is likely not the most effective level of subscription. We would look to review this to ensure the maximum return on investment was achieved. Whilst this might result in marginal additional spend the increased supply of prospects could push rents higher.
  • Facilitation of maintenance and facilities management - we feel this is an area of improvement, expensive daily outsourced resource is being provided both at an RSA level but also maintenance. We would look to gain efficiencies here particularly considering our wider Manchester portfolio.
  • We believe a root and brand review of the current PPM schedule and improved procurement can secure savings.
  • Property inspections
  • Property and tenancy management
  • Coordination of snagging and warranty management
  • Management of common parts and outside demised realm
  • We feel savings can be achieved around the approach to FM which appears to be outsourced completely.
  • Allsop manage the specialist contractors directly to ensure profit margins do not lead to overspend.
  • The site clearly has a lot of whitegood call outs. There are various options available to insulate the client from further callout risks.
  • We believe it would be prudent to assess the current Glide contract to see if further savings could be achieved in light of the contract likely approaching a review date.
  • Rent collection and account management - we note Duet's current budget for bad debt is 0.87%, ALM BtR performance is less than 0.25% and so improvements would be made in this area immediately.
  • Client accounting, financial management and reporting
  • Overarching strategic asset management - a PowerBI dashboard would be produced for the client to facilitate better cross party strategic discussions on rental, leasing, occupancy and cost performance.
  • Budgeting
  • Facilitation and support of ancillary services and additional income generating activities
  • Assistance with valuation inspections, audits and management related information
  • Portfolio performance analysis
  • Director led service delivery

Allsop utilises specialist property management software (Yardi) in order to deliver an end-to-end seamless customer experience.

We are able to provide a suite of policies and procedures to better inform you of our management approach but would stress this is one of collaboration with some policies such as Pet Policies bespoke to our clients dependent upon their own desires for how they want to see their sites run.

Allsop has a specialist credit control team and are incredibly proud of the performance they create, indeed we believe our efforts in this regard can give our clients a competitive edge when it comes to underwrite.

Regarding maintenance and defects, we always ensure we are fully informed in terms of the development SLAs already in place and ensure any aftercare service in place replicates those expectations. In terms of our mandates for expenditure these can be negotiated upon each instruction, but our system allows us to create varying mandates within Allsop dependent upon staff seniority whilst client referrals are also possible. It is our intention to run Duet as efficiently as possible.

It is anticipated Allsop will leverage our national network of contractors whilst also ensuring we take advantage of suitably qualified local trades as we take the scheme on. Supporting local contractors is good for ESG credentials. Our approach is to ensure contractors are aware of our specification within the homes and to ensure they have a good supply of spare parts in this manner a first time fix approach can be taken reducing mileage, reducing call out costs and also ensuring customer experience is maximised. Allsop also have significant scale in Manchester and Salford.

Energy procurement at Allsop is something we have a huge amount of experience of, all of our sites have their energy regularly reviewed to ensure we are optimising returns. Examples of energy efficiency initiatives have included energy retenders, replacement of estate halogen bulbs, installation of water source and air source heat pumps as well as purchasing energy daily rather than locking in on expensive contractors when wholesale energy costs are reducing.

Allsop Bringing property & people together.