Gemma Price has been appointed head of property management at residential property manager urbanbubble.
With more than 20 years of experience across a wide range of business sectors including property, leisure and hospitality, Gemma joins the Manchester-based business from her role as head of operations at Recom Solutions and a director at Hardcastle and Hogarth Ltd.
Prior to her three years at Recom, Gemma spent seven years at commercial property group Bruntwood in a head of property role.
Her role at urbanbubble sees Gemma focus on leading the property teams in delivering the highest levels of customer service across the firm’s block management portfolio. The plan is that the role will evolve as the company continues to grow with Gemma developing the service delivery teams across several new customer groups.
Gemma said: “Choosing urbanbubble was an easy choice for me, not only is the company at a very exciting point in terms of business growth, it also has a very strong values culture and a customer centric business where the customer is at the very heart of it. Customer service is what I am passionate about, so there is a genuine fit between my own personal aspirations and those of the business.”
Michael Howard, founder and managing director of urbanbubble, said: “Gemma brings with her a veritable wealth of experience in the property sector and we’re excited by what she can bring to her new role. We have every confidence that Gemma will be a great asset to urbanbubble.”
Based at Sevendale House in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, urbanbubble recently expanded its property management activities outside the North West of England by securing further nationwide Build to Rent (BTR) schemes with Legal & General.
Following the success of the partnership’s inaugural BTR scheme, multi-award winning The Slate Yard in Salford, Greater Manchester, urbanbubble has taken on the management of Legal & General’s latest BTR schemes in Bath and Birmingham, alongside its newest acquisition in Deansgate, Manchester. With the extension of the partnership, urbanbubble will manage over 1,500 BTR apartments on behalf of Legal & General.
urbanbubble will also support Legal & General in underwriting future acquisitions as the company seeks to rapidly expand its BTR portfolio to 6,000 units by the end of 2019.
Driven by urbanbubble’s increasing nationwide reach and growing number of units under management, forecast to almost double from 8,000 to more than 15,000 by 2021, the fast-growing firm expects to see revenue rise to £6m in the year ending June 2019, with further growth to £9m in 2020 and to £12.5m in 2021.
In Manchester, urbanbubble expects to be managing some 2,500 residential units by late 2019, while in Liverpool the number of homes under its management is forecast to increase from 1,700 at present to about 4,000 by 2020. In these regions, the business manages schemes on behalf of Legal & General and other blue-chip clients such as English Cities Fund, Salboy, Elliot Group, PAG, Capital and Centric and Mulbury.
Delivering the expansion from urbanbubble’s head office is a workforce set to double in size from 150 to about 300 by late 2019.
