City Relay · London property management · award-winning short-term-rental specialist
From 2 in Spain to 10 in the Philippines.
A London property-management company has been entirely UK-based. Post-pandemic, they want a real remote support team — first in Spain, then in the Philippines. How fast can they actually staff a foreign market they have never operated in, and how do they not turn into an entity-management business while doing it?
Working with Teamed since 2022, City Relay built a 10-person Philippines support team within 18 months of their first 2-person Spain pilot — an 80% increase in global workforce. They run all hires under Teamed EOR with no local entities. Same-day onboarding is now their operational baseline. 25% of total headcount is remote-international today; their internal target is 30%.
- Global workforce growth via Teamed
- +80%
- Philippines team size (from 2-person Spain pilot)
- 10 employees in 18 months
- Fastest reported onboarding
- < 24 hours
- Stated local-compliance outcome
- 100% (Philippine labour law)
- Compliance queries answered in real-time
- 60–80%
- Remote share of total headcount
- 25% today, 30% target
- Teamed partnership tenure
- Since 2022
- Country expansion path
- Spain → Philippines, both under EOR, no local entity established
- Onboarding speed
- Same-day onboarding (< 24 hours) is the operational baseline, not an exception
- In-country specialist model
- Named Philippines specialist (Paulina) handles local labour-law specifics including night-differential rules
- Compliance response time
- 60–80% of compliance queries answered in real-time by Teamed in-country team
Facts confirmed by City Relay. Last verified 2026-05-14.
Challenge
City Relay — an award-winning London short-term-rental specialist — was entirely UK-based pre-pandemic. Post-pandemic shifts in the property-management market reshaped where the work could happen: customer service and administrative roles no longer needed to be in London. Amy Pantlin, the firm's Head of People, wanted to build a remote support team but had no in-house capacity to learn either Spanish or Philippine employment law, no appetite to set up legal entities in either country, and no patience for the typical multi-month international-hire onboarding cycle that the rental market's seasonality made unworkable.
Approach
City Relay engaged Teamed in 2022 starting with two hires in Spain. The structural decision was EOR-only: Teamed's local entities are the legal employer; City Relay is the operational employer running customer support, training, and culture. As the model proved out, the firm shifted the next round of hiring to the Philippines on the same structure. A named Philippines specialist (Paulina) runs the day-to-day local labour-law specifics — including the night-differential rules that apply to a 24/7 support operation, which would be a learning curve for any UK people-ops team.
Result
In 18 months, City Relay grew the Philippines team from zero to 10 people while keeping the Spain hires in place. Total global workforce grew 80%. Onboarding cycles compressed to under 24 hours when needed. 25% of total City Relay headcount is now remote-international, with an internal target of 30%. The model has held: a London property-management business running multi-country support operations without becoming an entity-management business in the process. The firm now actively recommends the model to peer property-management operators.
Decision checklist
- Pilot the first country with the smallest credible team (City Relay started with 2 in Spain) so the EOR structure proves itself before scale commits.
- Pick the second country deliberately — different time zone, different cost structure, different talent depth — to test the model's portability before committing further.
- Insist on a named in-country specialist before signing. "Help desk" is not the same as Paulina-in-the-Philippines.
- Build engagement rituals (social events, team shout-outs, cross-country collaboration moments) as soon as the second hire lands. EOR removes the legal friction; it does not solve culture by itself.
- Review headcount-by-country every 6 months. Most City-Relay-scale operations stay on EOR indefinitely; entity setup is rarely the right move below 10–15 per country.
Frequently asked questions
Why two different countries (Spain and the Philippines) instead of doubling down on one?
Different operational answers. Spain solves Europe-time-zone customer support and gives access to a multilingual European talent pool. The Philippines solves 24/7 coverage (UK overnight = Philippines business hours) and accesses a deep English-speaking customer-service market at a lower cost structure than Western Europe. The portfolio approach — two countries, different roles — is more resilient than concentrating everything in one foreign market, and it lets City Relay match role economics to country economics without forcing trade-offs.What are the Philippine night-differential rules and why do they matter for a 24/7 support operation?
Under Article 86 of the Philippine Labor Code, employees who work between 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM are entitled to a night-shift differential of at least 10% of their regular wage rate per hour. Sundays and holidays carry additional premiums (Articles 93 and 94). For a UK property-management operation routing overnight customer support to the Philippines, this means the effective wage cost is higher than the headline salary by a country-specific factor that needs to be modeled into staffing decisions. Teamed's in-country specialist handles the application of the rules; the customer's job is to confirm the shift pattern and approve the cost loading.How does 24-hour onboarding actually work in practice?
Three preconditions: (1) the local employment contract template is already approved and country-correct (Teamed maintains this for every operating country); (2) the customer has provided the role-specific terms — salary, start date, work pattern — through Teamed's onboarding interface; (3) the candidate has supplied the locally-required identification and tax/social-security documentation. With those in place, the contract issues, the employee accepts, and the local payroll record opens in the same business day. The 24-hour timeline is not magic — it is the result of removing the country-research, legal-review, and contract-drafting steps that normally consume weeks.When would City Relay outgrow EOR in the Philippines?
For Philippine professional-services salary levels, the EOR-to-entity crossover usually lands somewhere around 12–15 employees — meaningfully higher than the European crossover because the underlying salaries are lower, which compresses the cost differential between EOR fee and entity overhead. At 10 employees, City Relay is still well inside the EOR window. The Crossover Calculator at /tools/crossover-calculator generates the country-and-salary-specific number; the operational decision (entity vs continued EOR) is the customer's, not the vendor's, and Teamed surfaces the math rather than pushing a direction.