“Our Seamless team members feel like part of the business. They’ve taken real ownership of the day-to-day and made life easier for everyone here.”
Sophie M., Lettings Manager, A.A. Fishers
For years, most UK property businesses have grown the same way. More properties meant more staff. More admin meant more hires. When pressure increased, the default response was to add headcount.
That operating model is no longer fit for purpose.
Rising labour costs, tighter compliance, and ongoing recruitment challenges have exposed a fundamental issue. Many agencies are not struggling because of market conditions alone. They are struggling because their operating model cannot scale efficiently.
High-performing agencies are responding differently. Instead of hiring harder, they are redesigning how work flows through the business.
At a glance, many property businesses appear healthy. Portfolios are stable. Teams are busy. Clients are serviced. But beneath the surface, inefficiencies quietly compound.
Common symptoms include:
According to Propertymark’s Workforce Report, over 60% of property firms say recruitment has become harder since 2022. At the same time, costs associated with hiring locally continue to rise.
When businesses respond by stretching existing teams further, performance suffers long before revenue does.
The historic property operating model assumes three things:
None of these assumptions hold true anymore.
The Office for National Statistics reports that over half of UK businesses now operate with remote or hybrid teams. Property firms are no exception, even if adoption has been slower.
Meanwhile, research from CIPD shows that vacancies in admin and operational roles are expected to remain difficult to fill for several years.
The result is a growing mismatch between workload and available capacity.
Forward-thinking agencies are no longer asking, “Who do we hire next?”
They are asking, “How should this work actually be delivered?”
That shift changes everything.
Instead of building teams purely around job titles, they are:
This approach creates capacity without inflating fixed costs. It also makes the business more resilient to absence, turnover, and market swings.
Remote support is often misunderstood as a short-term fix. In reality, high-performing agencies treat it as part of their core structure.
Remote property professionals handle work that is:
This includes compliance tracking, maintenance coordination, renewals administration, reporting, and client communication support.
By integrating remote roles properly, agencies free their in-house teams to focus on relationships, negotiation, and growth.
At Seamless, this model is designed intentionally. Remote professionals work UK hours, integrate into existing systems, and are supported by structured onboarding and oversight. The result feels less like outsourcing and more like extending the team.
You can see how this works in practice across our approach to building remote property teams
Agencies that rethink their operating model benefit in ways that go beyond cost savings.
They gain:
Crucially, they remove the founder or MD as the operational bottleneck.
According to RICS, firms with stronger operational structures are better positioned to adapt during periods of uncertainty. Structure, not effort, becomes the competitive advantage.
The question facing founders and MDs today is not whether remote support works. That has largely been answered.
The real question is whether your current operating model is designed for where the business is going, or where it used to be.
For many agencies, growth is no longer limited by demand. It is limited by capacity, clarity, and structure.
Those who address that now will lead the next phase of the property market. Those who do not will continue working harder for diminishing returns.
If this is a conversation already happening internally, it may be time to take a closer look at how your team is built and where capacity is really being lost. Book a call.
