During a recent podcast conversation with Clare Yates and Jo Bourne, Clare asked a question that stopped me in my tracks. Letting and estate agents are routinely given people’s front door keys, alarm codes and security information. We allow them to bring complete strangers into our homes, handle significant amounts of money and, in the case of managing agents, make decisions involving what may be one of the most valuable assets we own. Clare’s question was beautifully simple: would you seriously choose the person entrusted with all of that simply because they were the cheapest agent in town?
The strange thing is that plenty of landlords effectively do. I’ve always found this fascinating because if somebody stopped you in the street and said, “Give me £20 today and I’ll definitely send you £100 next week,” most sensible people would immediately want to know who they were, what protection existed, whether the business was regulated and what happened if the money disappeared. Yet someone can walk into a property worth £500,000, £1 million or considerably more, confidently announce that they can achieve a higher rent than everybody else while charging the lowest fee, and quite often walk out with the keys.
I’m obviously biased. I’ve run a London letting and management agency since 2004, but I don’t think the conclusion should be that landlords ought to choose the most expensive agent either. The real problem is that price is incredibly easy to compare while value is much harder to assess before you’ve experienced it.
A landlord’s first choice, second agent
At Base, we’ve developed a slightly odd way of describing ourselves: a landlord’s first choice, second agent. It sounds contradictory, but anyone who has worked in lettings for long enough will probably understand exactly what I mean.
Many landlords choose their first agent almost accidentally. Perhaps it’s the office nearest the property. Maybe they’ve seen lots of their boards locally, a leaflet landed on the doormat at the right moment or somebody offered a particularly attractive fee. Sometimes it’s simply the agent who suggested the highest rent during the valuation. None of those things necessarily tells you whether that company is any good at managing a home.
The problem is that an agent’s real value often only becomes apparent when something goes wrong. The tenant stops paying, a significant leak appears, there is an insurance claim, a contractor badly executes an expensive piece of work, a complaint escalates or somebody discovers that an important compliance requirement has been missed. Suddenly the landlord learns considerably more about the agent they appointed than they ever did during the valuation.
That experience tends to change how landlords approach the search the second time around. They ask better questions because they now understand what can actually go wrong. The fee still matters, of course, but so do experience, professional standards, communication, compliance, reviews and evidence that the company can handle the difficult bits rather than merely finding a tenant when the market is buoyant. Unfortunately, in London lettings, discovering that distinction can come with a very substantial bill attached.
Good property management can look remarkably uneventful
One of the awkward things about good property management is that success can look like very little is happening. The rent arrives, the resident is happy, repairs get dealt with, compliance is kept on top of and problems are addressed before they become expensive. The landlord doesn’t hear very much because there isn’t very much they need to hear.
One of our landlords, John, captured this perfectly in a review earlier this year. He said he hadn’t had much contact with Base and that, to be honest, this was exactly how he liked it. We had found new residents quickly, dealt with a couple of teething problems and he was happy knowing we were only a phone call or email away. Another landlord, Zsanett, who had become an overseas landlord for the first time, described having “absolute peace of mind” that her property was in good hands.
Those comments get remarkably close to describing what many landlords are actually buying when they appoint a managing agent. They aren’t paying us because they desperately want another company to communicate with every Tuesday. They’re partly paying for the privilege of not having to think about the property all the bloody time. That isn’t laziness; it’s outsourcing something complicated to people who spend every working day doing it.
It also highlights one of the problems with comparing agents purely by fee. If everything is going well, good management can appear easy. You see the rent arriving and perhaps a handful of emails, but you don’t necessarily see all the knowledge, systems, checks, relationships and preventative work sitting behind that uneventful month.
Lower management fees could cost you everything
We recently took over properties from a landlord who had successfully self-managed for around 15 years. She wasn’t a bad landlord. Quite the opposite, in fact: her residents liked her and were happy in their homes. What she didn’t have was an understanding of how much the regulatory environment had changed around her.
When we reviewed the properties, we found significant compliance gaps. What had felt like 15 years of saving management fees suddenly looked rather different when set against the potential financial exposure created by getting important legal obligations wrong. This wasn’t someone deliberately avoiding her responsibilities. She genuinely believed she had been doing things properly, which is precisely why I think the example matters.
The point isn’t that every self-managing landlord is sitting on a compliance disaster. Plenty are knowledgeable, conscientious and extremely capable, and appointing an agent doesn’t magically remove every responsibility from the landlord either. The point is that saving money and receiving value are not the same calculation. If you’ve saved a few thousand pounds each year but inadvertently created exposure many times greater than the saving, the management fee looks rather different with hindsight.
The financial consequences of getting things wrong can now be considerable. Changes introduced under the Renters’ Rights Act took effect for private assured tenancies in England on 1 May 2026, while the rent repayment order regime can now expose landlords to repayment of up to two years’ rent for qualifying offences. Failure to license a property where a licence is legally required is one offence for which an RRO can apply. On some of the homes we manage, two years’ rent could be around £60,000. That is before considering the underlying problem, professional costs or any other enforcement consequences that may apply.
For a landlord, this is where the true value of expertise becomes much easier to understand. You aren’t simply paying someone to collect the rent. You are paying for people who should know what you don’t know, notice what you haven’t noticed and tell you when something needs addressing before it becomes considerably more painful.
Both agents charge a percentage. That doesn’t make them the same product
Clare made a comparison during our conversation that I think property businesses should use more often. Hotels all fundamentally provide somewhere to sleep, airlines all transport you between two places, and cars ranging from a battered old runaround to a Rolls-Royce ultimately perform the same basic task. We don’t therefore conclude that they should all cost the same.
The obvious counterargument is that expensive doesn’t automatically mean good, and I completely agree. A terrible £500-a-night hotel remains a terrible hotel, just as a beautifully branded agency charging a premium fee can still deliver dreadful service. Price alone tells you very little in either direction.
We’ve had prospective landlords tell us they want to work with Base but another agent down the road will manage their property for 12% rather than our 18%, so if we want the instruction we’ll need to match the fee. We don’t match it because we know what it costs to deliver our service properly and we’re unwilling to remove parts of that service or cut corners simply to win an instruction.
My preferred analogy is slightly less glamorous than Clare’s hotel example. A quarter-pound burger at Flat Iron costs considerably more than a quarter-pound burger at McDonald’s, but nobody marches into Flat Iron demanding they match McDonald’s price on the basis that both products contain roughly the same amount of beef. We instinctively understand that we’re comparing much more than weight. Professional services deserve the same consideration.
What should a landlord actually compare?
If management fees don’t tell you enough, what does? This is where things become harder because there isn’t a single metric that provides the answer, and I would be suspicious of any agent claiming there was.
Professional standards are one place to start. Is the agency voluntarily part of a recognised professional body such as Propertymark? What qualifications and ongoing training exist within the team? Who is actually going to manage your property once the charming person conducting the valuation has left? The answers tell you considerably more than the number of boards the agency has managed to erect in your postcode.
Then look at what customers say when the agent isn’t controlling the conversation. Reviews matter, but don’t simply look at the headline score. Look at how many there are, how far back they go and whether positive experiences have been delivered consistently over many years rather than clustered around a recent campaign asking happy clients for feedback.
For a letting agent, I would look particularly closely at who is leaving those reviews. At Base, our roughly 1,500 verified reviews are fairly evenly balanced between owners and residents, which is important to us. We have always believed that the landlord is our client and the resident is our customer. In today’s rental market, an agency boasting that landlords love them while hundreds of residents describe a miserable experience would worry me enormously.
This isn’t something we’ve invented for a new regulatory era. We’ve worked this way since we opened our doors in 2004. In recent years we’ve simply given it a name: renting done right.
I’d also look for evidence of consistency. Awards shouldn’t decide who manages your property any more than a single review should, but repeated independent recognition over many years is another useful piece of evidence. Look at the quality of the agency’s marketing, its website, the information it publishes and how professionally it presents other people’s properties. Individually, none of these things proves excellence, but collectively they begin to tell you what sort of organisation you’re dealing with.
That is really the point. Don’t look for one badge, one statistic or one cheap percentage that makes the decision for you. Look for a pattern.
What does “expensive” actually mean?
Base charges 18% including VAT for full management. Somebody can put that number next to an agent charging 12% and reasonably observe that our headline percentage is higher. The comparison only becomes meaningful, however, if the services behind those two percentages are actually the same.
Many agencies charge separately for work that we include within our management service. Tenancy agreements, deposit administration, notices, compliance work and other pieces of tenancy administration can all attract additional fees depending on the agent. Once those charges are included, the difference between a supposedly expensive service and a cheaper one can become much smaller, disappear altogether or even reverse.
For context, Foxtons currently publishes a 13.2% including VAT first-year long-term lettings fee, with its property-management service adding 7.2%. Its published landlord charges also include £450 for a long-let tenancy agreement, £50 for deposit registration, £150 for a Section 8 notice and a 12% coordination fee on works over £1,000. This isn’t a criticism of Foxtons; its fees are publicly available and landlords can decide for themselves whether the service represents value. It simply demonstrates why comparing one headline percentage with another rarely tells the whole story.
We include many of those everyday administrative services within our 18%. For major projects above £5,000 that genuinely require us to manage the project, we may charge an additional project-management fee. If a £6,000 boiler replacement simply requires us to arrange the work and carry out a final inspection, however, we’re not going to manufacture a management fee because the contractor’s invoice happened to cross an arbitrary threshold.
This is why I don’t particularly like the word “expensive” without context. It is ultimately about value. We consider ourselves one of the best letting and management agencies in London. That is obviously a bold claim for the owner of an agency to make, but more than 1,500 verified customer reviews and over 30 industry awards accumulated over many years give us reasonable grounds for making it.
For me, though, the important conversation isn’t about who has the smallest percentage. It is about what you are actually getting, what else you might pay and what value the service creates over the life of the relationship.
Your agent should be prepared to tell you things you don’t want to hear
There is another test I would add, and it is difficult to assess from a fee sheet: does the agent appear willing to disagree with you?
One of the most dangerous versions of agency is the person so desperate to win your instruction that every answer happens to be the one you wanted. Your property is worth more than everybody else suggested, the fee can always be reduced, nothing you’ve asked for presents a problem and everything will be done exactly as you want. It might feel wonderful during the valuation, but I’m not sure that’s what professional advice is supposed to look like.
A good agent should want your business without needing it badly enough to abandon their professional judgement. We see ourselves as advisers, risk managers, asset partners and advocates. Sometimes doing that job properly means explaining that a landlord’s preferred approach isn’t sensible. It might mean recommending expenditure they hadn’t planned for, challenging an unrealistic rent expectation or explaining why something that was acceptable ten years ago isn’t acceptable now.
Those conversations aren’t always comfortable, but they are part of what you’re paying for. An agent who tells you what you need to hear rather than what they think will win the instruction may ultimately be worth considerably more than the one who knocked another percentage point off their fee.
The resident experience matters to landlords too
One of the biggest shifts in the rental market is a growing recognition that landlords cannot sensibly regard the resident experience as something separate from good asset management. I’d actually argue they never could.
Happy residents communicate. They report maintenance issues, look after their homes and are more likely to stay longer when the property continues to suit them. When something goes wrong, an established relationship also makes it considerably easier to find a sensible solution. None of this means agreeing with every request or forgetting who employs us. Our landlord remains our client, but treating the resident as a valued customer is entirely compatible with protecting the landlord’s interests.
This is another reason I think landlords should look at reviews from both sides of an agency’s relationships. If an agent can consistently keep owners and residents happy, that tells you something about how they communicate, how they solve problems and how they behave when the interests of the two parties don’t perfectly align.
For us, that balance has always been central to what “renting done right” means. Professional property management isn’t simply about protecting bricks and mortar. It is about protecting an asset while recognising that, for the person paying to live there, that asset is also their home.
Look beyond the percentage before handing over the keys
There is no magic percentage at which a letting agent becomes good. Some inexpensive agencies provide excellent service and some expensive ones don’t. A large branch network proves very little about the person who will answer the telephone when your resident reports water coming through the ceiling at five o’clock on a Friday afternoon.
That is why I think landlords should approach the decision much more broadly. Your property may be worth hundreds of thousands or millions of pounds. You’re handing somebody the keys, access to the home, responsibility for significant amounts of money and a role in helping you navigate an increasingly complicated regulatory environment. It seems reasonable to spend rather more time investigating them than simply comparing two percentages.
Look at their professional standards. Read what owners and residents say about them. Examine the quality and consistency of their work. Ask what is included in the fee and what isn’t. Find out who will actually manage the property. Ask difficult questions and pay attention to whether they give you thoughtful answers or simply the answers they think will win the instruction.
Most importantly, consider whether you would trust these people when something genuinely difficult happens, because that is when the difference between agents becomes clearest. When that moment arrives, the difference between 12% and 18% may turn out to be one of the least interesting numbers involved.
