During my first year at PRUPIM I worked on the Industrial Asset Management Team. The role provided me with a wide variety of valuable experience, all of which can be applied to my APC competencies.

As the year has progressed I was given increasing amounts of responsibility enabling me to gain an understanding of the true role of an Asset Manager, and the amount of work involved, whilst being given support when required and supervision at all times.

It is impossible to describe a typical day as each one is different, making the role much more interesting. On average I spend one day of the week out of the office inspecting and measuring properties, attending marketing meetings, property management meetings and meeting with tenants and building consultants.

On days spent in the office I have a number of ongoing leasing cases to deal with including new lettings, rent reviews and lease renewals.

A new letting involves liaising closely with our Lettings Agents to ensure, through negotiation, that we obtain the best deal for the Client Fund. Once the Heads of Terms have been agreed I instruct solicitors and monitor the progress to completion.

When dealing with a rent review case there are a number of stages involved which, briefly, include checking the documents, mainly the lease and any licences to assign or alter, searching for comparables in the vicinity to obtain an understanding of the rental levels in the area, visiting the property to inspect and measure and visiting the comparables to ascertain whether or not they are suitable to be used as evidence, sending out a rent review quoting letter and then negotiating either directly with the tenant or with the tenant’s agent.  It is a great feeling when you achieve a significant uplift in the rent and make a difference to the performance of the asset, however small the contribution is.

Lease Renewals also offer the opportunity to negotiate directly with tenants’ or their agents and again there is a great feeling of satisfaction when an increase in the rent is achieved, especially when the negotiations have lasted a few months.

The management side of the role is incredibly diverse and I have been involved in a wide range of tasks ranging from refurbishment projects to serving schedules of dilapidations, approving service charge budget expenditure and actual expenditure reports, authorising licences to assign and sub let and instructing solicitors and liasing with the facilities managers who deal with the everyday management tasks such as the landscaping contracts and security staff.

A huge benefit of working at PRUPIM is the opportunity to spend a whole year on the same team as some of the cases I started work on 9 months ago are only just reaching completion now and some are still ongoing, it would have been a real shame to move after 6 months having not seen any of my work through to the end.