What to get right before opening serviced apartments

Serviced apartments, whether they are run as aparthotels, extended-stay or long-stay, sit somewhere between a hotel and a block of flats. That in-between position is exactly what makes them worth getting right. A guest can book one for two nights and treat it like a hotel. Another stays two months and treats it like home. Neither use falls neatly under a single set of rules. If you are appraising a scheme, there are a handful of decisions worth pinning down before the money is committed, and this is what we run through.

Know what you are actually building

A serviced apartment earns its money differently from a hotel room, because each unit does more work. It usually has a kitchenette, which is what allows the same room to take a short business stay or a long residential one. That flexibility is the commercial case for the whole model. It also generates most of the technical and regulatory complication that follows, which is why it wants to be understood while you are still appraising the scheme rather than once you are on site.

Planning and use class

Do not assume the use class is settled. Depending on how the accommodation is let and serviced, a scheme can fall under a hotel use, a residential use, or a sui generis category of its own. The answer shapes planning, building control and how the operation is allowed to trade, so it is the first thing to establish with the local authority. Everything else is built on top of it, and getting it wrong is expensive to unwind.

The distinction is not academic. A residential (C3) scheme can carry affordable-housing and community-infrastructure-levy obligations that a hotel or sui generis use may not. Whether the units end up on council tax or business rates is a separate question again, set by the Valuation Office Agency’s short-let test rather than by the planning class. The London ninety-night rule, which turns short-letting a dwelling beyond ninety nights in a calendar year into a change of use that needs permission, only bites where a scheme is really C3 flats let short-term. A properly consented hotel or sui generis serviced-apartment scheme sits outside that cap, which is one more reason to settle the use class first. Where the position is genuinely unclear, a Lawful Development Certificate is worth having to put it beyond argument.

The fire strategy leads the design

A kitchenette in every unit means cooking in every sleeping room. That has a direct bearing on compartmentation, detection, suppression, extract, and the finishes and appliances you are permitted to use. In practice it tends to push you towards induction rather than gas hobs, non-combustible finishes around the cooking zone, heat detection where a smoke detector would nuisance-trip on a piece of toast, and mechanical extract that clears cooking smells without undoing the compartmentation you have just paid for. Settle the fire strategy early. Once it is fixed it governs what furniture and equipment can be specified, so leaving it late forces you to reopen decisions that felt closed. Reworking a specification while it is still on paper costs very little. Reworking it after a pre-opening inspection is a different matter altogether. Our write-up of a soft-refurbishment opening in Earls Court shows how a kitchenette in every room shapes the fit-out, the systems and the way the place is run.

FF&E and the programme

Furniture, fixtures and equipment are often where an opening is won or lost in the final stretch. On a large scheme, deliveries have to be sequenced against limited storage, and the snag list has to be worked in order of what actually stops a unit being sold, rather than grouped by which trade is responsible for it. Treat the FF&E logistics as a programme item in their own right, and give them the same planning attention as the works themselves.

The operating stack

A finished building still has to be sold and run before it earns anything. That calls for a property management system able to handle both short and long stays, a payment provider chosen against the real mix of transactions rather than the headline rate, and a rate structure that is loaded and then tuned through the opening weeks. It also means a distribution setup that reaches both business travellers and the longer-stay booking channels, and a payment approach that copes with a card taken at check-in for two nights and an invoice raised monthly for two months. These decisions are best made alongside the works rather than after them.

Servicing two kinds of guest

A serviced apartment looks after two very different residents at once, and the way it runs has to flex for both. The two-night guest behaves like a hotel customer and expects to be looked after, on arrival and through the stay. The two-month resident wants the opposite, more independence, room to store and launder their own things, and to be left to get on with it. That difference runs through the whole operation. It sets the housekeeping cadence and how you charge for it, the storage and laundry the building needs, how hard-wearing the finishes have to be, and how much staffed presence the front desk really warrants. Decide early where the property sits on that line, because it is slow and costly to move once the building and the operating model are both fixed.

People and procedures

The team has to be recruited and trained in time for opening, and the way the property runs has to be written down. Front desk, housekeeping, maintenance and escalation all need documenting so that the operation does not depend on the memory of whoever happened to open it. Standard operating procedures are unglamorous work, and they are what separate a smooth first month from a chaotic one.

A realistic timeline

A soft-refurbishment opening goes best when the building works and the operational stand-up run together rather than one after the other. The common mistake is to treat the whole thing as a construction project with the operation bolted on at the end. In practice the operational side is a substantial part of the job in its own right. Most of what has to work on the first day is decided months before anyone opens the doors.

If you are weighing up a scheme like this, ask the operational questions early. The sooner they are raised, the cheaper the answers tend to be.