If you are thinking about stepping back from block management, we would like to be on your list of people to talk to. We are particularly interested in small, boutique managers in London and Norfolk.
Retirement, most often. Sometimes a business that has grown past what one person wants to run, or a portfolio that no longer fits alongside a lettings or surveying practice. Occasionally a founder who wants to keep working but stop owning.
None of those are distress situations, and they are usually decided over months rather than weeks. Which is why the conversation is worth having before it becomes urgent.
Funding is not the difficult part. What takes the time is deciding whether we could look after the buildings properly once they were ours — and that is a real limit rather than a polite one.
A portfolio we could not service to the standard we hold ourselves to is one we would decline, however well it priced. We would rather take on one book of business and look after it than three and apologise.
Which also means we can move at the pace a seller needs rather than the pace a deadline sets.
Small, boutique block and property managers. Not consolidators, and not large books being broken up — the businesses we are most interested in are the ones where a handful of people know every building by name, and where the owner has been doing it long enough to mind what happens next.
Those tend to be the hardest businesses to sell well, because the value sits in relationships rather than in a spreadsheet, and a large buyer will strip exactly the thing that made them good.
London and Norfolk in particular. London because it is where we already work. Norfolk because we have long-standing connections to the county and intend to build there properly rather than manage it from two hundred miles away.
How the buildings have been looked after. Whether the records exist. What the relationships with residents are actually like. And whether the person selling minds what happens next — in our experience the ones who do are the ones worth buying from.
Buy a portfolio in order to strip the cost out of it. Service charges are residents' money, and a business bought on the assumption that the service can be reduced is a business that will lose the buildings within three years anyway.
We would also not take on more at once than we could service to the standard we hold ourselves to. If that means declining part of a portfolio, or phasing a handover across a year, we would say so at the outset.
If you manage a building with us and have found this page, the question it raises is a fair one: does growth come at the cost of attention?
Our answer is that it does, if you let it, which is why we grow slowly and turn work down. Any acquisition would be judged first on whether the buildings we already look after would notice — and if the answer were yes, it would not happen.
Write to team@goodmanagement.co.uk. Nothing said is binding on either side, and we are content to sign an NDA before anything is discussed in detail.
Usually on a multiple of recurring management fee income, sometimes on profitability, occasionally on a blend. What moves the multiple is the quality of the income rather than its size — how long the agreements run, whether they renew without being re-won, how concentrated the book is, and whether the business can operate without the owner in it.
We are not going to publish a range. There are no reliable public figures for this sector, and anyone quoting you a firm multiple before they have seen the books is guessing. What we can say is that the drivers above are the ones any buyer will look at, and they are worth understanding before you start a conversation with anybody.
It depends entirely on how a sale is structured, and the difference is worth knowing early.
On a share sale — where a buyer acquires the company itself — the employer does not change, so TUPE is not engaged and staff simply continue.
On a sale of the book of business, the change of agent is a service provision change. Staff wholly or mainly assigned to that work transfer automatically to the incoming agent on their existing terms and conditions, which cannot be altered simply because they have moved.
Neither route is inherently better. But if you have people who have been with you a long time, it is a conversation to have at the outset rather than at heads of terms.
Again it turns on structure. On a share sale the contracting party does not change, so existing management agreements continue as they are.
On a sale of the book, each agreement has to move across. For a residents' management company or an RTM company that is a decision for the board rather than a vote of every leaseholder, though consulting residents is good practice and, in our view, the right thing to do.
Months rather than weeks, and usually for contractual reasons rather than commercial ones. Management agreements commonly carry three to six month notice periods, and some can only be terminated on an anniversary or a financial year end. That timetable tends to set the pace of a handover more than either party does.
Not to talk to us. A broker earns their fee by creating competition and running a process, which matters if you want the highest number the market will bear. If what you want is a straightforward conversation with one buyer about whether the fit is right, you can have that directly and instruct someone later if it goes anywhere.
A conversation. No documents, no numbers, nothing binding on either side. We are happy to sign an NDA before anything is discussed in detail, and equally happy for you to tell us it is not the right fit.
If it goes further, the next step would be understanding the buildings and the agreements rather than the accounts. The accounts matter, but they come second.
General information rather than legal or financial advice. Anyone selling a business should take proper advice on their own position.