View publication - Chartered Institute of Housing

PART ONE: LEARNING TODAY
Meeting the skills challenge of the residential property
management sector
By Bob Keats, Examiner for the IRPM and Jeff Platt, Chief Executive of the IRPM
Summary
Over the past ten years residential property managers have seen the
professionalisation of their activity. With this has come rising management
standards for clients and customers alike. Landlord and tenant law is different
for long leaseholders with variable service charges so the use of knowledge
and the ability to apply that knowledge in a competitive environment is
essential. The IRPM provides the credentials for experienced and well trained
property managers. The wider housing industry can learn from the
experiences of the residential property management sector in terms of
customer engagement and service quality.
The IRPM at Ten
The Institute of Residential Property Management (IRPM) is ten years old. It was
incorporated at the end of 2002 and now the new professional association has grown
to almost 3,000 members. It holds a niche position in the existing framework of
professional associations which includes RICS and CIH and it sits between the two:
RICS focuses on property; and in addition to bricks and mortar CIH embraces wider
community dimensions. The IRPM links both of these for the management of
leasehold blocks.
In those ten years the economy has swung from boom to bust and those investing at
the height of the market have struggled, many others have done very well. There have
been leaseholders right back to the middle ages, but leasehold flats are a more recent,
twentieth century phenomenon. High rise and high density living in our urban centres
has now created almost two million leasehold flats in England and Wales and the
common parts of these buildings need managing. Some blocks are managed collectively
by groups of leaseholders, some managed by individual landlords and some by
managing agents. The picture more recently has been complicated by mixed tenure
developments encouraged by S106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, so
now there are leaseholders, investors, social housing tenants and private sector tenants
living side by side.
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