Given the context of a rapidly evolving social, economic and environmental landscape - and further government legislation on landlord and tenant issues looking increasingly likely to be implemented - access to reliable, independently validated data is becoming increasingly important to property professionals.
BDO’s Service Charge Accounting team is working in association with the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors to develop a solution: PropCost, an industry-leading, independent benchmarking tool for service charge costs. As market leaders working to the latest RICS and ICAEW technical guidance, BDO is well-positioned to deliver a powerful addition to the property manager’s toolkit, providing real-time, detailed insights to the monitoring, analysis, and control of service charges.
Delivering this Winter
Development of PropCost is already underway, and we’ve shared a number of constructive conversations with clients and industry contacts, identifying the initial dataset and standing data that we require to develop a high-quality benchmark.
Our focus in 2022 will be on gathering and analysing data for UK office buildings, and we expect to deliver a launch report next winter. This analysis will be based on expenditure data recorded for years ending 2021, allowing this to have been fully reviewed and validated by BDO before this is loaded into the dataset.
Future development will widen the scope of PropCost to other property types, such as retail and industrial. Additionally, as production continues, the digital platform will provide users with costings reports, trend reports, sector and geographical trend analysis, and insight reviews, all based on data captured on evolving property market.
Listening to the industry
We recently hosted discussions with Paul Bagust and Peter Forrester from RICS, as well as number of clients and industry contacts. These sessions were an opportunity to introduce PropCost, answer questions about production of the tool and gather industry feedback. We’ve collected some of the key insights and questions raised in a summary report, which we invite you to download and read. These insights will inform our decision making as progress through 2022 and develop our first outputs.
If you would like to learn more about PropCost, or understand how you can contribute to the project, please contact Andrea Hunt.
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