Prime Property Movers By Luxury London

Bold & Reeves’ Bill Shipton On His Unique Prime Property Management Service That’s Taking London’s Super Prime Market By Storm.

Here’s a 21st-century conundrum: the hydraulics break on your sinking swimming pool just as you’re about to take a dip. What do you do? It’s a problem that a number of Bill Shipton’s clients have faced – clients who, with busy lives and homes across the globe, don’t have the time to spare on such logistical nightmares. Their solution? Dial the number for their 24/7 property manager, who will hook them up with a sub-aquatrained hydraulics engineer to solve their swimming woes.

This is the service that Shipton provides through his prime property asset management company Bold & Reeves, which he founded seven years ago after looking for a similar service for his clients, and coming up short.

“I was running an office for a Middle Eastern family and I was looking for a solution to outsource the management of their very high-end properties in Mayfair, Chelsea and Kensington,” he explains. “I couldn’t find anybody who could provide what I was looking for. The more we looked at it, the more it seemed to me that there was an opportunity.”

So, how does it work? Shipton and the team provide clients with a complete survey of their property, and record everything on an electronic logbook. This serves as a maintenance schedule for the building, with a register of every asset, when it needs to be serviced and how much it will cost.

“We think of a property like a car, a yacht or a plane, which needs proactively managing and preventative maintenance,” Shipton says. “You wouldn’t buy a second-hand car without a full-service history and a logbook, and yet properties change hands for millions of pounds and there’s really very little knowledge about the history.”

Each client is equipped with a personal property manager, who is on call 24/7 and has a black book of vetted contractors that they can deploy to help with any problems, from dwindling water pressure to broken air conditioning units to faulty car lifts.

“Our service provides short-term peace of mind and convenience for our clients,” Shipton adds, “but also the long-term benefit that comes from demonstrable management will manifest itself in the enhancement of the property. Insurance companies love what we do, because we lower the risk of things going wrong.”

Currently, Bold & Reeves manages 80 properties, which Shipton estimates to span around 600,000 sq ft of super prime central London and have a combined value of around £1.5bn. More recently, the company has begun working with a number of developers and is also managing six super prime apartment blocks. Sights are being set further afield.

“We’re continuing to thrive in super prime central London, and there are some areas in the near home countries where there are pockets of high-value properties that we think would value from our service, such as Wentworth and St George’s Hill in Weybridge,” Shipton says. “But what we really want to do is educate the market, particularly homeowners, that these valuable assets need proactive management. That is our absolute key message.”

Written by/Featured in: Luxury London

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