Should you hire a project coordinator for your property development?

Somewhere around your third active project, the admin stops fitting in the evenings. Invoices queue up unchecked, the drawdown pack becomes a monthly scramble, and you catch yourself drafting a job ad: a project coordinator, maybe an operations manager. The short answer on cost: a £35,000–£50,000 salary comes to £3,500–£5,000 a month once employer's National Insurance, pension, holiday cover and equipment are loaded on — before the recruiter's fee, and before the months it takes a new hire to learn how you work.

Whether that's money well spent depends on what the work actually is. This piece sets out what the role covers, what it truly costs, when the hire is right — and the alternatives when it isn't.

The moment the question appears

The trigger is nearly always the same. Projects one and two run on the founder's discipline: one spreadsheet, one inbox, evenings absorbing the overflow. Project three breaks the pattern — not because the projects got harder, but because admin scales linearly. Every extra development brings close to 100% more paperwork: its own facility, its own drawdown cycle, its own trades chasing payment, its own variations. Nothing about running two projects prepares the system for running four.

So the question arrives: do we need someone to run this? It's the right question. The reflex answer — a full-time hire — is only sometimes the right answer.

What a project coordinator actually does

Strip the title back and the work is specific:

• Chasing documents — invoices, insurance certificates, warranties, quotes — and filing them somewhere findable.
• Checking invoices against the contract and what's already been claimed, before they're paid.
• Keeping the cost plan and cashflow current as variations land.
• Assembling the drawdown pack each period and getting the monitoring surveyor what they need.
• Tracking programme dates, facility conditions and renewals before they become problems.
• Keeping the record of decisions: what was agreed, with whom, for how much.

Two things stand out about that list. It's genuinely important — done badly, it leaks real margin (see what the drawdown cycle costs you). And almost none of it needs to be done by an employee sitting at a desk you provide.

What the hire really costs

The advertised salary is the smallest number in the decision.

• Salary: £35,000–£50,000 for a capable coordinator; more in London.
• Loaded cost: employer's National Insurance, pension, holiday, sick cover and equipment take the real figure to £3,500–£5,000 a month.
• Recruitment: a recruiter's fee up front, plus the interview weeks you don't get back.
• Ramp time: months before they know your contractors, your facility terms and the way you run a job.
• Key-person risk: when they leave — usually mid-build — the filing system, the contractor history and how your business runs walks out with them.

And one structural problem no salary fixes: a fixed hire gives you fixed capacity against a lumpy pipeline. In a quiet quarter you're paying for capacity you don't need. When two deals land at once you're over capacity again — with a salary on top.

When hiring is the right call

Sometimes it is. The honest markers:

• You're consistently running five or more active projects, and the work is constant rather than lumpy.
• The role is bigger than admin — you want someone on site, managing people, making calls in your absence.
• You're building a team anyway, and coordination is one strand of a broader operations role.

If that's where you are, hire well and pay properly: a good operations person in a genuinely full-time role earns their keep. The mistake isn't hiring — it's hiring a full-time salary to solve a part-time, spiky, systematisable problem.

The alternatives, compared

A fractional or part-time PM. £1,500–£2,500 a month buys experienced judgement a day or two a week. Works well when what you need is a second pair of senior eyes. The limit: the admin doesn't stop when their day ends — the chasing, filing and reconciling still needs a home the other three days.

A development manager. Typically 1–2% of build cost. On a £2m build at 1.5%, that's £30,000, and the role usually spans the whole delivery function, not just admin. Right for developers who want delivery run for them end to end; expensive if what's drowning you is the paperwork.

Admin as a service. The newest option, and the one BankBuild was built to be: the coordination function delivered as a service — documents chased, invoices checked, cost plans kept live, drawdown packs assembled — priced per project per month and sized to the facility. The admin runs whether it's Tuesday or Christmas week, capacity follows your pipeline up and down, there's no recruitment and no key-person risk — and the record of how your business runs stays yours instead of leaving with an employee.

The comparison to run is always against the loaded hire, not the salary: the same admin, for less than the cost of the coordinator, live in days rather than months.

The question that decides it

Boil the decision down to one question: is the work constant enough to fill a salary?

Map your last eighteen months of projects against a line for fixed team capacity. If the work sits steadily above the line — five-plus concurrent projects, no quiet quarters — hire, and hire well. If the picture is what it is for most UK SME developers — lumpy, seasonal, deal-dependent — then a fixed salary is the wrong shape for the problem.

What you actually need is capacity that scales the week a deal lands and scales back when you're quiet — without a desk you have to keep busy in between. That's the shape the admin-as-a-service model exists to be, and it's the comparison worth pricing before you sign the job ad.

Frequently asked questions