An urban crossroads in Kentish Town, north-west London, is home to property services group Ringley – almost whichever way you look.

On the western corner sits the diversified concern’s head office, knocked through and enlarged earlier in the summer. Ninety degrees to the south is Camden Gateway, a co-working centre operated by Work for Ringley. Opposite is the base of Ringley’s valuation business.

As she points out the surrounding buildings, it’s clear that Ringley founder and group managing director Mary-Anne Bowring is proud of the business she first sketched out at her kitchen table – helped by a friend and a splash of wine – three decades ago.

Away from the crossroads there are other Ringley offices in the West End, Cardiff and Manchester. “Turnover-wise, we are at about £10m now,” Bowring says. “People-wise, including the staff on site, we’re about 246.”

Take those numbers on trust because the group is structured as a set of independent businesses, each filing abbreviated accounts. The group includes a legal practice, accountancy practice, fire safety consultancy, building surveyors and facilities management, plus co-working and the group’s core property management business, trading as UNA.

"Turnover-wise, we are at about £10m now. People-wise, including the staff on site, we’re about 246"

"We don’t have a parent holding company,” Bowring explains, arguing that clean separation of activities makes it easier to reward performance.

As a whole, Ringley has a strong focus on the living sectors. It manages build-to-rent (BTR) assets and co-living schemes on behalf of owners including Aberdeen, Europa Capital and Patrizia. Bowring says the group manages just under 16,500 units around the country, primarily in established BTR hotspots.

In June, Ringley was contracted by Cole Waterhouse and Taurus Investment Holdings to manage the 291-home Erie Dock Apartments (Eda), the tallest residential building in Salford Quays, Manchester.

Some single-family housing is also under management, Bowring says, while parts of the group have also tackled student rooms and later-living schemes.

Bowring recalls the early days of BTR in the UK, more than a decade ago. “A lot of it was hot air and talk at the beginning, but we had the pleasure of starting our [BTR] journey with Moda,” she recounts. “We set up their operational plans, designed the front and back of house. We then did some work with Grosvenor, which ended up in Grosvenor selling a building in Edinburgh to Moda [in March 2017].”

Work for Long Harbour followed, before the developer set up Way of Life, its own management arm. More recently, Ringley has worked with developer Rise Homes following its Gresham House-funded launch in April 2019.

Bowring says her firm’s “magic sauce” has been its technology stack, developed in-house “from top to bottom”.

“Lots of people say they’ve got tech, but normally they’re harvesting from [Microsoft visualisation tool] Power BI over lots of bolt-ons that don’t fit together,” she states. “But we’ve invested over £15m now, over the years.”

Digital tools

The latest addition is artificial intelligence (AI), currently helping to digitise records: “By the end of the summer, we’ll have taken 10,000 PDFs out of the business because the AI not only reads it and interprets it, but it puts it into the database as well.”

Some documents are simple to ingest, while others need human help. But the process “is changing how we think and how we work”, Bowring says. She adds that the firm “delayed probably six months” in rolling out AI while it built its own large language model (LLM), rather than trusting external AI services.

“We’ve fed [our LLM] with only things that we want it to know,” she explains. “It doesn’t go anywhere else – it’s like a locked-down world of only property expertise. [It] can write in sentences, but it’s only writing it from what we’ve given it, which is really important.”

Unusually, Bowring is qualified as both a chartered surveyor and a chartered engineer, a combination that has proven helpful. “I understand technology and I’ve probably invested all my holidays in it,” she says. “Because we are privately owned and self-funding, we’ve made sacrifices to be who and what we are.”

She adds: “I enjoy growing things; I enjoy excellence; I enjoy simplicity. But, unfortunately, you have to make things quite technically complicated to make the task [of property management] simple.”

Ringley has also drafted in human expertise, with head of research Jen Siebrits joining the group in September last year, after 20 years at CBRE. “She was surprised by how much data we’re sitting on,” Bowring says.

In November 2023, Ringley hired group chief executive Richard Williams, who had previously held managing director roles at both Avison Young and CBRE. Bowring stepped down from CEO duties when he arrived. And in May 2024, Martin Samworth – a four-decade veteran of CBRE and former RICS chair – came on board, initially as a non-exec and then, from December 2025, as group chair.

Bowring describes Samworth as someone “who loves sniffing out a deal”, but laughs at the suggestion he might root out a buyer for Ringley.

“We’re fiercely independent and that’s our destiny,” she says. “We don’t need money. We don’t want to be [part of a] conglomerate because that would steal the entrepreneurial spirit that we have. And I’d rather have happy people who can be the best that they can be.”

The group’s arms have multiplied due to the core goal of driving down operating expenditure. “The whole point of BTR is it’s a vertically integrated model, where you trim away third-party contractors to produce a better NOI [net operating income],” she says. “We’re lucky because we’ve always had fire consultants and building safety people and all of that in-house.”

But she adds: “No one’s interested in that. The funds [ie, building owners] are interested in the ability to drive rents.”

RRA shifts the goalposts

To that end, following rent restraints enacted by the Renters’ Rights Act (RRA), Ringley has begun gathering data to support future reviews, tracking gross and net costs of BTR versus private rented sector (PRS) alternatives.

Section 13 of the RRA has shifted the goalposts around rent reviews, with landlords expected to demonstrate that increases reflect open-market levels.

“We’re ready to defend [our clients] in tribunals and section 13 rent reviews by proving that there’s a premium for BTR,” Bowring explains, arguing that a monthly charge covering accommodation, power, heating, water and wifi, for example, is obviously more than just rent.

"It won’t be long before every rent, like every house price, will be public. I think that’s coming"

“You’ve got to dissect your BTR [charge] before it becomes comparable to a PRS rent,” she says. “If the valuation office or the rent office doesn’t understand that, then there’s a squeeze for the wrong reasons.”

It is vital to be prepared, she adds. “I suspect it’s not long before every landlord will be registered in England – they already are in Wales – and it won’t be long before every rent, like every house price, will be public, too. I think
that’s coming.”

The RRA has also swept away the ability to write tenancy agreements designed to avoid vacant units in December – the hardest time to re-let. Now, any tenant can leave with two months’ notice, with no pre-agreed break points.

Bowring says it is too early to tell how patterns will settle: “I don’t think we’ll really know the true effect of the RRA until December’s been and gone.”

Manchester mystery shopping

benchmark the journey from initial enquiry through to a property viewing, scoring the quality and accuracy of information, staff interaction, onsite viewing experience and presentation of amenities. The schemes inspected included some managed by Ringley, with enquiries made by a new hire acting undercover.

Pitfalls uncovered included shortcomings in sales techniques, particularly through failures to follow up at different stages. Ringley’s analysis identified steps in the process that were especially prone to error across the board.

https://infogram.com/average-score-across-46-btr-schemes-out-of-5-1h1749wjem59q2z

Top performers:

Anaconda Cut

Best for customer service and overall experience
New Vic

Best for community amenities and lifestyle offering
Clippers Quay

Best for professional leasing experience
The Residences

Best for facilities and wellness amenities
At the other end of the pipeline, Ringley has undertaken mystery shopper research to better understand the journey from enquiry to letting agreement. It looked at 46 different BTR buildings in Manchester – some managed by Ringley – with a new employee going undercover to experience everything from chatbots on websites to the final apartment viewing (see box above).

“There were some shockers,” says Bowring, explaining that many failings boiled down to poorly briefed agents who failed to sell the benefits of BTR. “And a lot was unreliable follow-up,” she adds.

The research also highlighted the importance of collaboration between letting agents and operators, Bowring argues.

“Our tech makes it possible for us to [connect from] head office through to site without any breaks, whereas [without that link] an agent is pulling triggers and levers they’re not quite connected with.”

Those disconnects will become more obvious in the future, she argues. “We’ve gone from BTR generation one to, in my opinion, BTR generation six,” she says, defining the first four generations, broadly, as the initial BTR concept, the amenities arms race, the move to resident-centric management, followed by the shift to data-led operations.

“By generation five we’re into partnerships outside the building to make the building ‘bigger’, and in generation six we’re in the journey to mine residents’ bank statements because of open banking,” she says. “From that we can tell if you’re at risk of arrears this month.”

And while AI is widely expected to make some human roles redundant, Bowring foresees new opportunities, too.

“If a business today has 2% to 5% of analysts, in 10 years’ time I think that’ll be 25% to 35% of analysts,” she says.

“Jobs are changing, but [that] means we can keep the same people, enrich them – because people can make themselves more valuable.”