Student accommodation
Property manager
A property manager is the person or firm that runs a building day to day on its owner's behalf: collecting rents, hiring and overseeing maintenance and suppliers, looking after whoever lives there and reporting back every month. In a student residence, that role usually falls to the operator.
Also known asproperty management · building manager · estate manager
What it does, exactly
If the asset manager thinks about the building's plan over several years, the property manager thinks about this week: that rents are collected, that the lift passes its inspection, that the fault on the third floor has someone to fix it and that the owner gets its report. In offices and retail it is almost always an outside firm; in student accommodation the PBSA operator usually takes it on, with a manager and a team in each building. In the United Kingdom the profession has no statutory regulation of its own, although whoever takes deposits on ordinary residential tenancies must protect them in a deposit scheme required by law. In Spain the English term is used as it is, alongside gestión patrimonial. The work splits into four fronts:
- Income: contracts, collections, deposits and claims.
- Building: preventive maintenance, maintenance tickets and suppliers.
- Residents: questions, complaints and community life.
- Owner: budget, reports and proposals for improvement.
Worth knowing
It is not an administrador de fincas. In Spain the administrador de fincas is the traditional figure for owners' associations: it works for a board of owners, under the horizontal property regime, and handles their accounts, insurance and building works. The property manager of a residence works for a single owner who lets the whole building, and its day revolves around whoever lives inside.
Sources
Related terms
- PBSA operatorA PBSA operator is the company that runs a private student residence day to day: it markets the beds, signs up the residents, manages reception, maintenance and cleaning and organises life in the building. It answers for the building's results to its owner, which is often a different company.
- Asset managerThe asset manager runs a building or a property portfolio on the investor's behalf: it sets the business plan, approves budgets and capital spending, oversees the operator and proposes when to refurbish, refinance or sell. It looks at the residence as an investment, not as a home.