PMR review Leasehold Management Staffing Outlook for 2026

Talent Supply, Wellbeing and Retention Pressure
Leasehold property management continues to face structural workforce pressure, with demand for experienced professionals consistently outstripping supply. LinkedIn Talent Insights data identifies Property Management as the fastest-growing real estate skill in the UK, increasing by 17% year-on-year, while overall workforce growth remains modest.
This imbalance is compounded by wellbeing challenges. The TPI Wellbeing & Resilience Survey Report 2025 found that residential property professionals recorded an average happiness score of 6.09, still materially below the UK national average of 7.0. While wellbeing scores have improved year-on-year, anxiety levels and workload intensity remain persistent issues, particularly within leasehold roles where regulatory complexity and resident scrutiny continue to increase.
Crucially for employers, the same research highlights that access to flexible or hybrid working arrangements is strongly associated with higher wellbeing, lower anxiety, and a significantly stronger intention to remain in the sector. This reinforces a growing consensus across the industry: role design is now as critical to retention as salary.

Salary Inflation Driven by Scarcity, Not Growth
Salary movement in leasehold management continues to be driven by skills scarcity rather than productivity or business growth. With fewer professionals entering the sector and regulatory complexity raising the baseline competence required, employers are paying premiums to secure experienced managers who can operate confidently in today's environment.
On-site estate and facilities roles, often funded through service charge budgets, continue to distort traditional reporting lines. In some cases, estate managers are earning salaries in excess of centralised supervisory roles, reflecting residents' and boards' willingness to pay for stability, competence, and risk mitigation in high-value or high-risk buildings.
This trend is unlikely to reverse in 2026, particularly as scrutiny of managing agents continues to intensify.

Preparing for Commonhold: Structural Change, Not Role Reduction
While Commonhold adoption is expected to be gradual, the direction of reform is already influencing organisational design. Government proposals point to a long-term shift toward greater resident control, enhanced governance transparency and clearer accountability frameworks.

Rather than reducing staffing needs, this shift is expected to:

• Increase demand for technical and governance expertise with a set qualification like TPI.

• Reduce reliance on generalist, "do-everything" block managers

• Accelerate the creation of specialist departments focused on:

• Lease and legal interpretation

• Compliance and building safety

• Major works and consultation

• Resident and board-level governance support / Resident Engagement Teams.

Early-adopting managing agents are already restructuring teams to separate relationship-led roles from enforcement, compliance and technical decision-making, reducing individual risk exposure and improving consistency across portfolios. This mirrors changes already seen in other regulated property disciplines and reflects a growing acknowledgement that the traditional block manager model is no longer sustainable at scale. People managing teams will know only to well this will be welcomed by Block Managers who often say 'I cant do it all, there is just not enough time.'
The Rise of In-House Risk and Building Safety Team
Alongside governance reform, we are seeing a clear and accelerating trend among larger managing agents: the move to bring risk assessment and asset inspection capability in-house rather than relying solely on external contractors. An outsiders view is that this comes down to a new revenue income.
In practice, this includes the introduction of dedicated roles such as:

• Fire door inspectors

• Fire risk assessors

• Planned and cyclical asset inspectors (e.g. fire alarms, emergency lighting, life-safety systems)

• Centralised risk and compliance officers

Mandatory Qualifications, A Question of When, Not If
There is a growing expectation across the sector that mandatory qualifications for leasehold and residential property management will be introduced in the medium term.
While no definitive implementation date has been set, the trajectory is clear:

Fire risk assessors

• Increasing regulatory scrutiny

• Rising expectations of professional competence

• Ongoing leasehold reform and Commonhold transition

• Persistent issues around consumer protection and accountability

Taken together, these factors make it highly likely that mandatory or minimum qualification standards will be introduced during or shortly after this reform cycle.
If you are looking for a new member of staff to your team and they are not qualified they will need to evidence a clear want to do this in the short term.

Despite this there has been no real change in employers introducing structured training pathways, and support functions for qualification. This remains something which a leasehold professional is expected to obtain directly from TPI and self study.

Commonhold
The transition toward Commonhold-ready operating models is being discussed by TPI with a few large agents having discussed this roles with us and that they intend to set up commonhold departments. The majority of agents are still dealing with the current changes impact and not got to looking at this opportunity yet.
However, if this becomes a shift we see in the sector the need for skilled staff - similar to when we saw the Building Safety changes will become a need without talent therefore employers should consider this a risk on their 2026 SWOT.

2026 Outlook - What This Means for Employers
By 2026, leasehold employers who succeed in talent attraction and retention will be those who:

• Design roles around specialisation and support, not legacy structures

• Treat wellbeing and flexibility as workforce infrastructure, not optional benefits

• Align recruitment and training strategies to future governance models, including Commonhold and the likely introduction of mandatory qualifications

As regulatory scrutiny increases and portfolio complexity grows, staffing will remain a material operational and reputational risk and one that cannot be solved by salary alone.

Annie McGrandles MRICS FTPI, Head of Portfolio & Block Management, Property Management Recruitment