Lyndsay Yuill didn't plan to go into property.
She worked in the care sector, running a project for young people aged 15 to 24 across Edinburgh — five staff, around 200 young people, and a purpose she found genuinely meaningful. Then the funding was cut. The council had an equal pay anomaly, male and female workers on the same bands not being paid the same, and when the back payments came due, projects like Lyndsay's were the ones that absorbed the cost.
While she waited for disclosure checks to clear before starting her next care role, she picked up work in a letting agency. It was supposed to be temporary. Within months, she'd been headhunted to open a Livingston branch for a Glasgow company. Within the year after that, she set up on her own.
That was 2008. She called it Live and Let.
Sixteen-plus years later, she's director of Rent Locally — a letting and property management company with 29 employees, an estate agency wing, and a gold award for Scotland's best letting agency from the ESTAS, voted by customers. The care sector is still the foundation of how she thinks about people, even if the people she's looking after now are landlords, tenants, and a team of 29.
Two companies, one direction
Rent Locally wasn't always one company. Lyndsay's business partners — John Horsburgh (now managing director), John Laurney (finance director), and Steven Murray (operations director) — had founded their own letting agency, also called Rent Locally, in 2008. Same year, same market, same starting conditions.
By 2012, both companies had grown to roughly the same size — and plateaued at roughly the same point. Both were so busy maintaining the business that there was nothing left for growth.
"We both kind of grown to a point and then plateaued. And we were both so busy just maintaining the business and running the business that we weren't able to grow again."
There's a family connection between them, which helped. But the logic of the merger was straightforward: more directors meant more capacity for growth, while the existing operations could keep running. Two websites became one. Two Rightmove listings became one. Two memberships, two sets of costs — stripped back to one.
"It was like almost effectively like taking a step back to take a step forward."
Why acquisition beats organic growth
Once the merger clicked, Lyndsay saw the pattern clearly: buying an existing book of properties is simply faster than growing one property at a time.
She explains it plainly. If your sales team can bring on one new property a day, that's organic growth — consistent, steady, incremental. But if you acquire a letting agency with 100 units, you've just moved past 100 days of sales in a single transaction. And the cost stripping that comes with any acquisition — fewer duplicated overheads, more combined profitability — means you have more room to reinvest and grow from there.
Rent Locally has acquired a couple of businesses since the original merger, and Lyndsay says the transitions have been smoother than people might expect. Their systems are solid. Their communication is proactive. Clients who've been on spreadsheets and phone calls tend to welcome the online portals and regular updates.
The trickier part is the human side. A small letting agency often starts with friends and family on the books. When someone sells a business they've built from scratch, there's real emotion in that handover. Lyndsay takes it seriously.
"It can be quite a personal book to them. There can be a lot of their friends and family involved with it as well. So it's really important to make sure that the things that are important to them are maintained throughout the transition."
Communication as a competitive advantage
Ask Lyndsay what makes Rent Locally different and she comes back to the same word: communication.
Not just responsiveness — proactive communication. Telling a landlord when maintenance is being done before they have to ask. Letting them know when rent has been paid. Keeping both sides of the tenancy informed before anything becomes a problem.
"If they're having to chase us up, then they're not as happy. So we always try and be proactive rather than reactive."
It's that focus on communication — backed by the systems and processes they've built over two decades — that customers voted for when they gave Rent Locally the gold award at the ESTAS for Scotland's best letting agency. Silver for estate agency. Bronze for best local group in the UK.
She's quick to note the unusual position a letting agent occupies: they're serving two customers at once, landlord and tenant, whose interests can sometimes pull in opposite directions. But Lyndsay says that's rarer than people assume. The vast majority of landlords and tenants both want the same thing: a hassle-free tenancy with as little disruption as possible. The work is in maintaining communication so that both sides feel looked after, especially in the moments when things get emotionally charged — a landlord who needs to sell, a tenant in arrears, a market that's shifted overnight.
20 years in, cycle two
Rent Locally launched during the 2008 financial crash, which Lyndsay describes as a fast, sharp learning curve.
"We learned the most that kind of couple of years than for a long period after."
Property is cyclical. Legislation changes, interest rates shift, taxation policies evolve. She watched entrepreneurial landlords put protection strategies in place during the crash — some got caught, some navigated through — and took note of the patterns.
Now that they're two decades in and into what she calls cycle two, those patterns are familiar.
"Now that we're in cycle two, it's a lot easier for us to spot it and to help people navigate through."
When a piece of legislation is coming in 12 months' time, Rent Locally starts training their team now, building the systems now, making sure staff, clients, and processes are all ready before the change lands. With 29 employees across multiple branches, you can't afford to wait until the last minute.
Collective collaboration
Lyndsay runs networking events — property networking, specifically — and has been going to events since she started out, except for the seasons when young children made it harder. She's clear-eyed about what networking actually gives you.
"You don't need to know everything about everything. You just need to know who to call to help you in a certain situation should it arise."
She uses the word that should probably appear on more business cards: collaboration. When a room of property professionals — letting agents, mortgage brokers, solicitors — put their different vantage points together, they come up with a clearer picture than any one of them could from their own angle.
"Collective collaboration does make you bulletproof."
About Lyndsay Yuill
Lyndsay Yuill is a director of Rent Locally, a letting and property management company with an estate agency wing, based in the Central Belt of Scotland. Founded — in its merged form — in 2012, Rent Locally has 29 employees and has won gold, silver, and bronze at the ESTAS awards, voted by customers. Lyndsay is a co-founder, networker, and advocate for work-life balance as an active, intentional business strategy.
