Q. How many people does it take to run a Build to Rent building?

Sounds like the opening line to a joke, but in fact it was a question an industry friend asked me when preparing to sit on a conference panel. Specifically, his question was whether there is a formula to calculate the number of onsite staff needed in a Build to Rent building?

After scratching my head, I concluded that not only is there not a formula I know of, there isn’t really a simple way to answer this. The range of different Build to Rent staffing models in my own experience runs from “quite a few” to “none at all” which didn’t seem very helpful, so I’ve been asking myself how does an operator decide how many onsite staff to deploy in Build to Rent?

First and foremost would be the impact of staffing on the bottom line, a calculation which starts from the very earliest stages of assessing a scheme’s viability. Managing the gross to net return is at the core of Build to Rent, so staffing assumptions often get baked in early on. Whether this is helpful or not to the management operator down the line, there’s no avoiding the fact that onsite staff cost money, quite a lot of it in fact, so the need to add staffing onsite can sometimes represent the tipping point between developing a site for Build to Rent or another use altogether.

But if that sounds simplistic, the equation very quickly gets complicated. What about the physical layout of the scheme, the perceived security of the location, the amenities onsite, the strategy for parcel delivery, maintenance and landscaping? Who will be leasing up the building, supporting move-ins, encouraging renewals, and eventually conducting check outs? How does the local market competition line up and how much is the promise of onsite staffing central to the operator’s brand?

The list of considerations in each case is almost endless, and that is perhaps why the range of onsite staffing models is so widely varied. Having visited unstaffed high-end rental buildings running mainly on tech, I have to say I’m ultimately not a fan. At the end of the day, however good the tech and service follow up is, unstaffed buildings just feel impersonal without a human face to warmly greet you.

For the operator though, there is ultimately only one key question. To what extent does onsite headcount enhance the performance of a building and hence increase its value as an asset? The answer to that equation is probably much more simple to express.

A. As few as possible, but as many as necessary.