Every FM owner I speak to knows how hard recruitment has become. Far fewer have worked out what that difficulty does to the value of the team they already have. The staffing shortage is usually filed under daily frustration. It belongs, just as much, under valuation, and read that way it works in the seller's favour.
What the Labour Market Looks Like
Recruiting and keeping skilled FM staff has become one of the hardest problems in the sector. This is a sector that has identified labour as its binding constraint.
Turn that problem around and it describes an asset. If the market cannot find enough people, then a business that already has a stable, trained team holds something the rest of the sector is struggling to build. Scarcity is exactly what gives an asset value, and in FM the scarce asset in 2026 is skilled, retained labour.
Why a Buyer Pays for It
A buyer can copy your service list overnight and match your pricing by lunchtime. What they cannot do quickly is assemble a workforce that turns up on Monday and delivers the contracts to standard. That is the whole point. When an acquirer models your business, the trained team is the input they cannot simply recruit on demand, which is why headcount, retention and skills coverage now feature so prominently in due diligence.
This is where self-delivery earns its premium. A business that delivers its contracts with its own people is selling capability it controls. A business that leans heavily on subcontractors is selling a set of relationships it does not fully own, and in a tight labour market those relationships are fragile. Between two otherwise similar books, the self-delivering one reads as more durable, and the offer reflects it.
The Mechanism That Makes It Transferable
A workforce is only an asset in a sale if it can move to the new owner cleanly, and the mechanism for that is TUPE. Its importance is rising rather than falling. A statutory two-tier workforce code is expected to take effect from October 2026, one month after contract season, and the government has separately launched a call for evidence on the future of TUPE.
It is too early to say where that review lands, and I would treat anyone who claims certainty with caution. What is clear is the direction: more scrutiny of how staff transfer, which raises the premium on owners who can show clean, well-documented transfer records rather than a history of disputes. The same paperwork that makes a transfer straightforward is the paperwork that reassures a buyer during diligence.
None of this asks you to change how you run the business. It asks you to be able to show who delivers the work, how stable that team is, and that the employment and transfer records behind them are in order. In a market this short of people, that evidence is worth real money when the offers come in. The staffing shortage is one of four forces I set out in the September briefing on the anatomy of a valuable FM book.
The staffing shortage is one of four forces in the anatomy of a valuable FM book. Read the full September market briefing, or start with a free, confidential valuation. No obligation, and nothing moves forward without your say-so.
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