Property services
Property Management
Opening, closing, staffing and everything between visits.
9 firms on the network Lake Como
The defining fact about a second house on this lake is that it is shut for eight months and lived in for four, and almost every expensive failure happens in the eight. Water is the reason. These houses sit at the bottom of a steep, wooded valley with a large body of water in front of them; the air is heavy for much of the year, north-facing rooms never see direct sun, and stone walls a metre thick take up moisture and give it back slowly. A closed house with no heat and no air movement will grow mould behind the wardrobes by February, and nobody will know until July. Add the pattern of rain here, with long, heavy autumn falls running off a hillside straight at the back of the building, and the ordinary jobs become the critical ones: gutters, gullies, the drainage channel above the terrace, the roof valley where the leaves collect.
The second fact is distance. Owners think in kilometres and the lake works in minutes behind a coach. A firm based at Como can reach Blevio in a quarter of an hour and Menaggio in something closer to an hour once the shore road is busy, and a burst pipe does not wait for the traffic to clear. What you are really buying is the ability of somebody to be at the house today, with a key, with the water main and the consumer unit already known to them, and with the number of a plumber who will answer on a Sunday in August. That is why we pay attention to where a manager physically is and how many houses they hold within reach of it, rather than to the size of the firm.
The relationship goes wrong in a predictable way. The owner is abroad, the house looks fine in photographs, invoices arrive with a lump sum and no third-party paperwork behind them, and after two years nobody can say when the boiler was last serviced. The managers who last are the ones who behave as though the owner will audit them: a written schedule of what is done and when, photographs after each visit, third-party invoices passed through with the original attached and any margin stated rather than buried, and one named person who answers the telephone. We look for those habits before we look at anything else, because they are also the habits that produce a house in good order.
01What they actually do
Opening and closing the house
Water on, heating up, shutters back, linen aired and every appliance tested a week before arrival rather than on the day, and the reverse, properly, in October.
The winter regime
Background heat, dehumidifiers emptied and monitored, frost protection on external runs, and a walk of the house and grounds after every serious storm.
Contractors, works and money
Appointing trades, being on site while they work, checking what was actually done, and passing invoices on with the original bill attached.
The waterside
Jetty, boathouse and slipway checked through the winter, mooring lines and fenders renewed before they chafe, and the boat lifted or covered on time.
02How we choose
We meet managers at houses they already run, out of season, with the owner's permission and usually without much notice. A house in February tells you everything: whether the dehumidifiers are running and emptied, whether the gutters were cleared before the autumn, whether the plant room is tidy and labelled or a nest of unlabelled valves. We ask to see the last twelve months of reporting for a house of similar size, and we ask the owner directly what happened the last time something failed.
Nobody appears on this list because they asked to, and nobody pays us to be here. We hold no introduction fee from any firm on this page, which is the only arrangement under which we could honestly tell an owner that a manager is the right one rather than the one who pays most. Where a firm has agreed preferential terms for members, those terms run to the member and not to us.
We take a manager off the list when the work slips, and with this trade it slips quietly. The signals are late reporting, invoices without the third-party bill behind them, a house that has visibly gone backwards between our visits, and a firm that has grown faster than the people it has to do the work. We would rather hold nine names we can stand behind than thirty we cannot, and there are stretches of shoreline where we simply say we do not have anyone good enough yet.
Property Management: questions
How much does a property manager on Lake Como cost?
Management is normally structured as an annual retainer covering an agreed schedule of visits and checks, with additional work charged for separately and third-party invoices passed on. We do not publish rates.
What moves the retainer is the size of the house, whether there is a pool, a garden of any scale, a boat or a jetty, how often you come, and whether the manager is expected to run staff. Ask for the retainer and the extras to be set out as two separate things, and ask specifically how third-party invoices are handled: at cost, or with a stated margin. A firm that will not answer that in writing is telling you something.
Do I need a property manager if I only use the house in summer?
That is precisely when you need one, because the risks to an empty house on this lake are concentrated in the months you are not here.
Damp, a failed dehumidifier, a blocked gully in November rain, a mooring line that parts in a spring storm, rodents in an unheated roof: none of these announce themselves, and all of them are cheap to prevent and expensive to repair. Owners who use a house for six weeks a year usually need more management than owners who are here half the year, not less.
Can my gardener or housekeeper look after the house instead?
They can hold a key and raise the alarm, but they are not insured, equipped or paid to make decisions about your building, and it is unfair to put them in that position.
The moment something fails, somebody has to authorise a contractor, be on site while the work happens and check it afterwards. A gardener asked to do that will either overstep or, more often, do nothing and wait to be told. Where the arrangement does work is with a resident couple who have been at the house for years and have a manager behind them for anything structural.
What should be in a management agreement?
A written schedule of visits and checks, a named person responsible, how out-of-hours failures are handled, how contractors are appointed and paid, and the notice period on either side.
We also ask for a limit above which the manager must reach you before committing to a repair, and for a standing instruction below it so that a burst pipe at midnight is dealt with rather than debated. Keyholding, insurance and who holds the alarm codes should be stated rather than assumed.
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Are you the bestat what you do here?
The list we introduce from is short and grows slowly: by working with somebody, seeing how a job goes, and only then adding them. If that is the standard you hold yourself to, tell us who you are. We read every one. We check work before we introduce anybody, and no money passes in either direction.
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