Ask most landlords where tenants come from and they will name the portals. Ask an institution where its relocating staff live and you will get a different answer: someone arranged it. A serious slice of London's rental demand moves through arrangements rather than listings, and the properties that capture it are the ones connected to the right pipelines.
What a corporate let actually is
A corporate let is a tenancy where the occupier arrives through an employer or institution rather than through open marketing. Sometimes the company itself signs the agreement and places its people in the property. Sometimes the individual signs, but the demand, the vetting context and often part of the support behind the tenancy come from the organisation moving them.
Either way, the practical profile is distinctive. The tenant has a job that caused the move, which means employment is verified by the situation itself. Start dates are fixed, so decisions are quick. And the stay is tied to a posting, a project or a rotation, which makes the tenancy dates unusually predictable.
Why the numbers behave differently
Three things change when a company tenant moves in, and each of them shows up in the owner's account rather than in the brochure.
Arrears risk falls
Rent that stands behind a salary, and often behind an employer's relocation arrangements, is paid with corporate reliability. Chasing is rare. The stressful end of lettings, the missed month and the difficult conversation, largely disappears from this segment.
Wear patterns improve
Corporate occupiers are typically working professionals who spend their days out of the property, and their agreements often carry conduct expectations from the employer side too. Inspections on this stock tend to be uneventful, which is exactly how landlords like them.
The calendar becomes plannable
Because arrivals follow postings and projects, corporate demand has a rhythm. A property released to this market at the right moment lets faster, and the end of one placement is often visible far enough ahead to line up the next. Voids shrink not through luck but through scheduling.
What corporate tenants want from a property
The requirements are consistent and worth taking seriously before marketing. Locations near the employer cluster or with a direct commute to it. Furnished, to a standard that photographs honestly. Everything working on day one, because a relocating tenant has no patience for a snagging list. And paperwork done properly, because the employer side of the arrangement frequently checks it.
Presentation matters more in this market, not less. A company arranging housing for its people compares options quickly and eliminates anything that looks unloved. The properties that win are not necessarily the most expensive; they are the most convincingly ready.
How landlords actually reach this market
Here is the honest part: you mostly cannot reach it by listing. Corporate demand flows through relationships, between organisations and the firms they trust to house their people. That is why access to it is one of the clearest reasons to choose a manager with genuine pipelines rather than a branch with a window display.
Morgan Prescott places tenants through relationships with corporate occupiers and some of the biggest institutions in and around London, alongside our partnerships with local authorities on the family housing side. When we appraise a property, part of what we are assessing is exactly this: which of our demand channels wants it, and what that channel will pay.
What a company let actually is, in legal terms
A company let is exactly what it sounds like: the tenant named on the agreement is a company rather than a person. That one change moves the tenancy out of the assured tenancy regime altogether, because the Housing Act framework, including everything the Renters' Rights Act changed in May, applies to tenancies granted to individuals as their home. A limited company cannot occupy a dwelling as its home, so the letting sits under ordinary contract law instead.
The practical consequences follow from that. The agreement can have a genuine fixed term with a genuine end date. Break clauses can be drafted to suit both sides. Rent review can be whatever the contract says it is. And when the agreement ends, it ends, without the possession grounds process that now governs lettings to individuals. None of this is a loophole; company lets have sat outside the assured regime since the legislation was written, because the protections were designed for people, not businesses.
The occupier, the human being actually sleeping in the property, is typically an employee, director or contractor of the tenant company, named in an occupier schedule and holding no tenancy of their own. Getting that schedule right matters, and it is one of the places where a properly drafted company let earns its keep.
The four kinds of corporate demand we place in London
Corporate tenants are not one market; they are at least four, and they want different things.
First, relocation and assignment. A business moves an employee to London for one to three years, often from abroad, and either the employer or its relocation agent takes the tenancy. These occupiers are salaried, vetted by their own HR department before we ever see them, and tend to treat the property carefully because their employer is watching. They want unfurnished or part-furnished family houses near schools and fast lines into the office.
Second, project teams. A contractor wins a defined piece of work, a hospital refit, an infrastructure package, a fit-out, and needs to house a rotating team near the site for the duration. These lets favour larger houses and HMO-suitable stock, and the company signs for the whole property.
Third, serviced accommodation and corporate housing providers. These businesses take property on multi-year agreements and operate it for business travellers and medium-stay guests. The covenant is the operator's, the property is cleaned and inspected far more often than any ordinary tenancy, and the landlord's experience is a rent that arrives from a business rather than a household.
Fourth, institutions and public bodies, including the local authority partnerships we write about elsewhere on this site. Here the occupants are placed by the partner, the agreement runs for years, and the demand is structural rather than seasonal.
A property that suits one of these channels often suits two or three, which is the point of working with a manager who holds relationships across all of them: when your property comes to market, it is matched against live requirements rather than simply listed and hoped for.
Referencing a company is a different discipline
When the applicant is a person, referencing means payslips, an employer's reference, a previous landlord and a credit file. When the applicant is a company, the questions change. How long has it been trading? What do the filed accounts show? Is there anything against it at Companies House, and are the people behind it who they say they are? Where the company is young or thinly capitalised, what stands behind it: a parent company guarantee, a director's personal guarantee, or a deposit structure that reflects the risk?
This is work we do as a matter of course, and it is where landlords going it alone most often come unstuck. A company let with a strong covenant behind it is among the most secure income a residential landlord can hold. A company let signed with a shell that was incorporated last month is not. The difference is visible before signature, if you know where to look.
A worked example: the same flat, three ways
Take a hypothetical two bedroom flat in Ealing that would list at £1,950 a month on the open market. Let it conventionally and a good year looks like this: twelve months at £1,950, less perhaps two weeks of void at changeover if the timing is tidy, call it £22,500 collected, before repairs.
Let it to a corporate occupier on a two year assignment and the arithmetic changes shape. The headline rent might be the same £1,950, sometimes a little more for a well presented property, but the term is longer, the changeover disappears from the middle of the tenancy, and the referencing risk is carried by an employer's covenant. Two years at full occupancy is £46,800 with one changeover instead of two.
Put the same flat on a fixed guaranteed agreement and the monthly figure is agreed up front and paid regardless of occupancy for the whole term. The headline may sit below the open market number; the certainty sits above anything the open market can offer. Which of the three is right depends on your mortgage, your appetite for gaps and how much you value not thinking about it. Our job is to put all three in front of you with real numbers.
Where company lets go wrong, and the drafting that prevents it
Most company let problems trace back to a thin agreement. The occupier schedule is missing, so nobody can say who should be in the property. The permitted use clause is vague, so a let intended for one employee quietly becomes short stay accommodation. There is no proper repairing and dilapidations framework, so the end of term becomes an argument. Or the break clause is one sided in a way nobody noticed at signature.
The fixes are not exotic. Name the permitted occupiers and require notice of changes. State the permitted use precisely and prohibit sub-letting and holiday use unless that is the actual deal. Inventory the property professionally at the start and inspect on a schedule. Match the deposit or guarantee to the covenant. We use agreements built for this work, reviewed as the law moves, and the result is that the company lets we manage end the way they began: quietly.
Making a property corporate ready
Corporate occupiers and the agents who place them make decisions quickly and against a checklist. Reliable broadband on day one. Clean, neutral decoration. A proper inventory. Furniture that suits a professional rather than a student house, or a genuinely unfurnished space a family can make their own. Compliance paperwork available on request without a scramble. None of this is expensive relative to the rent it protects, and we tell landlords plainly which of these gaps, if any, stand between their property and this market.
Questions landlords ask us about company lets
Does my mortgage allow it? Many buy to let products permit company lets and some restrict them, so we check consent before anything is signed rather than after. Where a lender's wording is unclear, we ask the lender in writing.
What about insurance? Tell your insurer the letting type. Policies written for a standard single household let need adjusting for company lets and for anything with rotating occupiers. Getting this right costs little; getting it wrong costs the claim.
Who fixes things? Exactly as in any managed tenancy: repairs are reported to us, triaged, and handled by our contractors, with the cost falling where the agreement puts it. Corporate occupiers tend to report early, which keeps small problems small.
Can the company just leave? Only on the terms the contract gives it. That is the discipline of a fixed term done properly: both sides know the earliest date the arrangement can end and what notice it takes to get there.
Negotiating with a company across the table
Negotiating with a corporate tenant feels different because it is different: the person you are dealing with is spending a budget, not their own money, and they answer to a process. That cuts both ways. On price, corporates are less emotional than households and more anchored to policy, so the winning move is rarely haggling and usually fit: the property that matches the brief, papered and ready, takes the requirement even when a cheaper one is available. On terms, expect requests households never make: invoicing to an accounts department, rent quarterly in some cases, a repairing standard written into the agreement, sometimes a break tied to the underlying project or assignment ending.
Each of those requests is negotiable, and each has a fair shape and an unfair one. A break clause, for example, is reasonable when it carries a decent notice period and sits after a minimum committed term; it is not reasonable as a walk-away-any-Friday option, and we do not sign landlords up to those. This is bread and butter work for us and unfamiliar ground for most private landlords, which is exactly why having someone on your side of the table who negotiates these weekly changes the outcome.
If you own property in London and you have never seen what the corporate segment would do for your numbers, that is the conversation to have. Send us the postcode and we will tell you within 24 hours, honestly, whether corporate demand is part of your property's strongest strategy.