ABOUT INFINITY STAYS
We take on fewer properties than we’re offered.
Ten years of running short lets between us, and 30+ units live in London and Manchester. Taking every property offered is the easiest thing in this industry to do, and the reason most owners have a bad story about a previous agent.
What happens when a management company grows too fast
Nobody notices for about six months. Then the cleaner is doing four turnarounds in a day and cutting corners on the fourth. Messages take a day to answer instead of an hour. Nobody’s looked at the pricing calendar in a fortnight. Reviews drift from 4.9 to 4.6, and the drop in bookings arrives two months after the drop in standards.
That isn’t bad luck, it’s arithmetic. So we add properties at the speed we can actually run them, which sometimes means telling a good owner we’ll come back to them next quarter. Every property we’ve taken on is one we can describe from memory.
We turn down more properties than we take
Not to seem exclusive. Because taking on a property that can’t perform ends with an owner disappointed in us.
We say no when the numbers only work in July and August. When the lease or the freeholder doesn’t genuinely permit short lets, whatever the seller’s agent claims. When there’s no local cleaning cover we can use or build. And when an owner wants a figure we don’t believe the property can earn, better an awkward conversation now than a shortfall every month for a year.
We’re just as selective about who we work with
With owners: we want the ones who want the property run properly, not the ones shopping purely on percentage. If someone’s decision comes down to a point of fee, they’ll leave over a point of fee, and neither of us gains anything from that year.
With investors: we’d rather source three properties for one person over five years than one property for five people. So we say no to briefs where the numbers only work if everything goes perfectly.
With cleaners, maintenance and trades: they’re the actual product. A guest’s experience of us is a bed, a bathroom, and how fast something got fixed. We pay them properly and on time, we don’t switch on price, and that’s why they answer on a Sunday.
The company is newer than the people in it
Between us there’s over ten years of doing this: properties run, guests handled, seasons priced, refurbishments delivered, and a fair number of expensive lessons paid for in other people’s businesses before this one. That’s the part that matters when something goes wrong at 11pm on a bank holiday. Nothing about a property surprises us for the first time.
This runs on relationships, not adverts
Almost everything good that’s happened to us came through someone who already knew us. Owners who moved a second property across. Agents and landlords in multiple cities who call us before a property reaches a portal. Investors who came back for a second purchase.
That’s a slower way to build a company, with one useful side effect: we can’t afford a bad outcome. There’s no flood of new enquiries to hide a poor month behind. The only way this works is if the people we’ve already got would recommend us, so that’s the thing we manage to.
Where we’ve actually done this
London and Manchester today. Before that, properties in Leeds, Sheffield, Nottingham and Liverpool. Four markets that behave nothing like London and taught us more than London did. We source through agents and landlords in Birmingham, Oxford, Brighton, Bristol and Cambridge, and most major UK cities.
If that sounds like how you’d want your property run
Send us the address. You’ll get a straight answer about whether it’s one for us, including if it isn’t.