Steph Yates
The second article in our series uncovering the hidden truths of property management procurement.
Every few years, a client comes to us wanting to run "one consistent tender" across a portfolio spanning, say, London, Paris, Madrid and Warsaw. The instinct is understandable: same evaluation criteria, same scorecard, same timeline, clean and comparable. In our experience, it's one of the fastest ways to end up with a result nobody trusts.
We wrote in the first piece in this series about the risk of running a coronation dressed up as a tender, a process where the outcome is decided before the questions are asked. The multi-country template is a different route to a similar problem. Here the process is genuinely open; the client genuinely wants the best answer in each market. But the template itself quietly picks a winner, because it rewards whoever's proposal happens to fit the shape of the document rather than whoever would actually manage the building best.
The issue isn't really language, though that's part of it. It's that property management doesn't mean the same thing market to market. In Germany, the split between Kaufmännische and Technische management is built into how firms are structured and how they price, and a bidder who doesn't offer a clean split will look expensive against one who does, even where the total cost of appointment is identical. In France, how a provider navigates the syndic-adjacent relationships and co-ownership structures popular there can matter more than the headline fee. In the UK, the market has consolidated enough that the real differentiator is usually account team quality, because most credible bidders can point to broadly similar systems and platforms.
Run identical scoring criteria across all of the above, and you're not comparing property managers. You're comparing how well each local team second-guessed a template written somewhere else, which is a genuinely different skill, and not the one you're trying to procure.
What we do instead is keep the governance and evaluation philosophy consistent across markets, while letting the substance of each RFP flex to the market it's being run in. The same standard of rigour, the same insistence on evidenced answers over marketing language, the same honesty about what the client is actually trying to learn, but different weightings for technical versus commercial criteria by country, different reference-check questions, and sometimes different bidder longlists entirely, because the firms genuinely strong in Warsaw are not always the ones with the loudest London presence.
The clients who get the most value from pan-European procurement are the ones who resist the temptation to make it feel tidy. A slightly messier process that lands on the right provider in each market beats an elegant single spreadsheet that quietly rewards whoever templated their answers most efficiently. Consistency of principle, not consistency of paperwork: that's the version worth having.
If you would like to talk about procurement and tenders in property management, please contact me at: steph.yates@remitconsulting.com.