Owning historic buildings at scale is a different challenge from buying one. The questions are not only "what is wrong with this building" but "what does the whole portfolio need, in what order, over what horizon and against what budget", and, for listed and historically significant fabric, "how do we look after it properly across the decades, not just this year".
This is the type of work I spent eight and a half years doing client-side at the National Trust: planning the care of everything from exceptional buildings like Blickling and Felbrigg Halls to scheduled monuments, holiday cottages, historic mills and heritage farmsteads, always taking the long view.
I bring that same discipline to estates and institutions that hold property portfolios and want them stewarded with judgement.
How this usually comes together
- Condition surveys and maintenance planning: a systematic account of what you hold and a prioritised plan for the years ahead.
- Heritage consultancy: specialist advice on listed and historically significant fabric: defect investigation, appropriate repair and liaison with planning and conservation authorities.
- Project management: running a programme of works through from feasibility to final account.
Where a programme of works follows, I can carry the project management and contract administration through myself, so the planning and the delivery stay in one pair of hands.
The holdings this suits
A landed estate with a hall, cottages, farm buildings and a mill, all ageing at different rates and competing for the same budget. A charitable trust that inherited buildings along with its purpose. A school, college or institution whose oldest buildings came with the site and have never had a plan made for them. A housing association holding listed or traditionally built stock inside an otherwise modern portfolio.
Where an engagement usually starts
Most start with a condition survey across the portfolio, because until one exists every decision about money is a guess. It gives you the baseline: what you hold, what condition it is in, what needs doing when, and roughly what it will cost. Everything after that is easier to sequence.
From there the work divides into what needs advice and what needs doing, and I can take either or both.
On scale
I am one chartered surveyor. For an estate that cuts both ways, and it is worth saying so at the start.
In your favour, continuity. The person who walked the buildings in the first year is the person who remembers why a decision was made in the fourth, which is precisely the knowledge estates lose when advisers change.
Against it, capacity. Where a programme is larger than I can carry properly, I will say so at the outset, and either phase it with you or tell you it wants a bigger practice.
Fees
I quote per engagement, and an estate relationship is usually a series of them. Each piece is scoped and agreed as it comes, with a figure in writing before you commit to it. Where the work runs on, a retained arrangement can make better sense, and I am glad to discuss one.