How to run a corporate housing supplier performance review in Málaga

Start with the decision the review has to support

A corporate housing supplier performance review is only worth running if it changes something: renewing a framework agreement, moving a second assignee into the same building, or dropping a supplier before the next project cycle. So before you design a scorecard, write down the decision. If you are placing one person in Málaga a year, a short post-placement conversation is proportionate. If you are rotating engineers through a TechPark project every quarter, you need numbers you can compare across placements and across suppliers.

The second thing to settle is who owns the review. In most mobility teams it sits with whoever signs the accommodation agreement, not with the line manager who hears the complaints. That split is why problems go unrecorded. If the person with the contract never sees the employee feedback, the supplier conversation defaults to price.

The service metrics worth tracking

Keep the metric set small enough that someone will actually populate it. Five or six indicators, captured consistently, beat twenty captured once. The following hold up across most corporate housing markets, Málaga included.

• Time to proposal. Hours or working days between your enquiry and a written, costed proposal naming a specific residence. This is the clearest early signal of how a supplier will behave under pressure later.
• Time to confirmed availability. How long between proposal and a residence actually held for your dates. Suppliers who quote fast and confirm slowly cost you more in rebooked flights than they save in rate.
• Invoice accuracy. The percentage of invoices your finance team accepted without a query. Track the reasons for queries too — wrong VAT treatment, missing purchase order reference, charges outside the agreed inclusions.
• Issue resolution time. Hours from the employee reporting a fault to it being resolved, not acknowledged. Separate urgent faults (no hot water, no internet, access failure) from cosmetic ones.
• Arrival readiness. A simple pass or fail on day one: were utilities active, was internet working, did access work without a physical key handover, was the residence clean and complete.
• Placement completion rate. How often an employee stayed for the full agreed term rather than requesting a move. Early moves are expensive and almost always traceable to something the review should have caught.

None of these require a system. A shared spreadsheet with one row per placement will carry a programme of twenty or thirty moves a year comfortably.

Collecting employee feedback that tells you something

Most post-arrival surveys produce a satisfaction score and nothing actionable. The fix is to ask about behaviour and specifics rather than feelings, and to ask twice.

Ask the first set of questions at day seven, while the arrival is still vivid: Was the residence ready when you arrived? Did anything not work? How did you get access? Did you have to buy anything the residence should have had? Could you work from the residence on day one, and from where?

Ask the second set at month two: Is the bedroom quiet enough to sleep well? Can you do a full working day here, including calls? How long does your commute actually take, door to door, at the time you travel? What do you do about laundry, groceries and pharmacy? Would you recommend this residence to a colleague arriving next quarter, and if not, what would you change?

The month-two answers are the ones that predict repeat suitability. Arrival problems are usually fixable; a residence that is noisy at night or a location that adds forty minutes a day is a structural mismatch, and no amount of supplier responsiveness repairs it.

Keep the survey under ten questions, make it anonymous to the line manager but not to you, and tell employees what you did with the previous round's answers. Response rates collapse when feedback disappears.

What is specific to Málaga

Two local factors deserve a column of their own in any Málaga corporate housing supplier performance review.

The first is the distinction between genuine corporate housing and holiday-market inventory dressed up for business use. Málaga has a large visitor accommodation sector, and some of it is offered to companies without the contractual basics: a company-to-company agreement, VAT-compliant invoicing, a named point of contact, and a residence that is not resold over the employee's dates. Test for it by asking how the supplier invoices, who signs the agreement, and what happens if an assignment extends. Palacete 10 is contracted company to company by Vamoz Marbella SL, with one agreement and one monthly IVA-compliant invoice covering everything, and the leasing and invoicing questions are answered in writing rather than case by case.

The second is the gap between advertised location and lived commute. Ask your employees for door-to-door times rather than relying on map estimates, and record the time of day. For reference, Palacete 10 publishes its own travel times and neighbourhood detail: 16 minutes to Málaga Airport, 19 minutes to Málaga TechPark, 10 minutes to María Zambrano, and a minute's walk to public transport and everyday shops.

Running the review conversation

Schedule it annually, or after every fourth placement if you move faster than that. Send the data in advance — the metrics above, plus anonymised employee comments — so the meeting is about causes rather than disputes over what happened. Cover four things: what failed and why, what has structurally changed at the supplier since the last review, what you expect to need over the next twelve months, and whether the agreement needs amending to reflect it.

A supplier who arrives with their own version of the numbers, and who volunteers the failures before you raise them, is usually worth keeping. One who treats the scope of what is included as negotiable after the fact is not, whatever the rate.

If Málaga is on your placement map for the coming cycle, request a corporate proposal and test the response time yourself — it is the first metric you will be recording anyway.