Opening the door to our new look

Back in August last year, we announced our acquisition of Life Property Management ltd (LPM), making us the second largest factor firm in Scotland. We now have a diverse portfolio of over 44k properties throughout the country, with a strong presence in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. It marks a major milestone in our growth journey, having now grown ten-fold in the last seven years.

We are delighted that we have now completed our integration with LPM and our two companies, staff, software, websites etc. are now combined in one new James Gibb business. We truly believe that the new business we have is way better than the sum of the two parts we had initially.

LPM had a great work ethic and their business ethos was based around the provision of good, open honest customer service. This was something that appealed to us greatly during the business acquisition process. Of equal importance to us was bringing the LPM team over, including their Owner/ Managing Director, David Reid, who has now been appointed to the role of James Gibb’s Group Managing Director.

Our new brand remains under the name of James Gibb residential factors, but reflects the identity of both firms. The circle logo along with the “doing it the right way” strapline came from LPM. It was important to us that we pulled over LPM’s culture and image. We’ve also changed our colour scheme – a fresh start to an exciting new journey.

It’s not just our visual identity that has been updated. Our teams across Scotland have now increased considerably, taking our total number of employees now to over 80 across our offices. This allows us to benefit from even greater capacity for delivering an excellent service to our clients with continued transparency, high quality service and value for money from us.

What does this mean for our clients?

As the saying goes, two minds are better than one, and this is certainly true of our integration with LPM. Already, our clients are benefiting from the introduction of improved levels of service, new technologies, and marketing-leading professional development across our business. We’re bringing together the very best of our two firms to create an even better experience for all clients, with the aim of becoming the market-leading factor firm in Scotland.

Any integration of this size and type brings, with it, change. We are confident that the changes we have made during the integration process will improve our service provision to you. We’ve outlined some key changes that will take place below.

Client Support Team

Communication is key to everything we do and, in order to make this as slick and efficient as possible, we’ve created a centralised Client Support Department. Our Client Support Team will handle all incoming queries, enquires and requests and pass them on as required. All calls to us, from now, should be made to our new Client Support number, 0333 240 8325 and emails should be sent to enquiries@jamesgibb.co.uk. This will ensure all requests are properly managed and acted on in line with our Written Statement of Services.

Written Statement of Services

As part of our integration project, we’ve created a new Written Statement of Services (WSS). This is very much in line with our existing WSS but contains a number of enhancements and changes so please take the time to read it. It sets out the details of our service package to you and demonstrates the offering you should expect of us. Our new WSS is now available for viewing or download from our website, www.jamesgibb.co.uk under the “Documents & Guides” tab. If you don’t have access to the internet, please call our Client Support Team and we’ll be happy send you a hard copy. Linked to our WSS are our Development Schedules which, as before are available via your James Gibb+ Client Portal or on the App. Again, if you don’t have access to this, give us a call and we’ll send a hard copy.

Property Managers = Development Managers

Our Property Managers will, from now, be known as Development Managers and their roles are being modified to ensure they can focus on operational requirements, site visits, projects etc. With an increased support structure, many of the administrative tasks will now be removed from operational duties allowing our Development Managers the time to focus on what’s most important; ensuring an efficient operational service to our homeowners.

Emergency out of hours response

Another improvement we’ve made is the introduction of a formal, fully manned, out of hours contact centre to deal with emergency situations out with our normal working hours. For a number of years now, LPM has employed a company called Property Response 24 to handle all out of hours emergency situations. This gives total peace of mind to all homeowners should anything happen that can’t wait till our offices re-open. Having an external company, ensures that all calls can be managed more effectively and efficiently and this will mean that emergency call out are better co-ordinate and response times optimised.

As this is an external company, there is a small annual charge, per property, which will be applied to your forthcoming invoice. We’ve successfully negotiated a very competitive rate of £5.00 plus VAT per owner per year. We’re confident that 50p per month is money well spent for peace of mind in the event of an emergency situation.

Further information on our re-launched, stronger, business will be provided in our forthcoming “address” newsletter. In the meantime, if you have any queries, please contact Client Support using the following details.