Last year we made some predictions of what may happen in Property Management; how did we do and what’s coming this year?
We said that one of the biggest issues we foresee coming next year is issues around availability of contractors and their cost. We expected prices to increase and with inflation and fuel we certainly saw an uplift of around 15%. Slightly less pressures this year will hopefully see a stabilisation. Perhaps we should have seen coming the increase in more extreme weather conditions and events which definitely occurred with more named storms in 2023 than ever before. With climate change it seems inevitable this will continue having an effect on maintenance and repairs.
We further predicted the deployment of more technology was one possible weapon against increasing costs noting the possible use of remote video triage, drone surveys and IOT sensors. We saw a huge increase in their take up in these, most notably remote video maintenance. We didn’t quite foresee the jumps in AI that we have experienced but are now confident in predicting that this will have the greatest positive effect on agents productivity and margins in recent history as well as addressing some staffing issues and improving customer experience. Back office, accounting and maintenance departments will see the most help from AI.
Outsourcing didn’t increase as much as we thought it may, instead what happened was a raft of mergers and acquisitions across the board including the creation of new huge entities, from what we have been told this will continue in the new year and what we may be left with is giant corporations and niche providers.
It was easy to say that 2023 would see the continuation and implementation of further regulation across all facets of the sector via both RoPA and The Building Safety Act and everyone within the industry will have been affected. Furthermore we now have the Leasehold Reform Bill and all the upheaval and lawsuits (probably) that will bring ; all of it keeping pressure on everyone working within the industry.
It’s going to be another very interesting year.
