A senior relocation to Madrid is rarely won or lost on the house. It is won on sequence: whether the school place, the residency permit, the lease and the first month of the new job were arranged in an order that made sense — or whether each was solved separately and the family spent a term living out of a serviced apartment while three suppliers blamed one another.
What the mandate covers
We take on the whole move, from the first conversation until the family no longer needs us. Six strands run in parallel, and the work is in keeping them in step.
- Residency and documents. The permit route agreed with specialist lawyers, the paperwork identified early, and every legalisation and apostille tracked against a date.
- Housing. Search across the open market and, where useful, direct approaches to owners, judged on the school run and privacy as much as on the building itself.
- Schools. A shortlist of international and bilingual schools, admission windows, assessment dates and an honest reading of where places genuinely exist this year.
- Mobility. Drivers, airport routes, the daily journey to the office and a fallback for the mornings when the usual route is closed.
- Introductions. Doctors, dentists, household staff, banks and, where relevant, the professional and institutional contacts that make the first year easier.
- The first thirty days. Utilities, registrations, deliveries and the hundred small failures that are trivial in your own country and exhausting in someone else's.
The order in which decisions have to be taken
Nearly every difficult relocation we inherit went wrong at the same point: the house was chosen before the school. Below is the sequence we work to. The dates are indicative and compress when a start date will not move.
| Stage | What has to be settled | When | What we deliver |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 · Assessment | Start date, family composition, work base and the things that are not up for negotiation. | Week 1 | Written brief and a calendar you can hold us to. |
| 2 · Residency | Which permit route applies and which documents must be legalised abroad. | Weeks 1–8 | Document checklist with an owner and a deadline for each item. |
| 3 · Schools | Shortlist, visits, assessments and places confirmed in writing. | Set by admission windows | School map with fees, places and door-to-door travel times. |
| 4 · Housing | Area, property, lease or purchase, works and furnishing. | Weeks 4–12 | Shortlist assessed on commute, privacy and family use. |
| 5 · Arrival | Utilities, drivers, medical cover, household staff and first introductions. | First 30 days | Settling-in plan with one named contact for everything. |
Choosing where to live
Prestige is the worst reason to choose a neighbourhood. The address that impresses at a dinner in London may add forty minutes to the school run and put the family on the wrong side of the city for the airport. We weigh six things, in this order: the daily journey to school, the daily journey to the office, privacy and security, the drive to Barajas, the quality of housing actually available at your budget, and whether the area suits how the family spends a Saturday.
Only then do we name areas — usually two or three, each with its trade-off set out plainly. Where the right house is not on the market, we approach owners directly through the same network we use for off-market acquisitions in Madrid.
Schools: the constraint that sets everything else
Madrid has an unusually deep bench of international and bilingual schools, which is precisely why the decision is difficult. Curriculum matters — a family expecting to move on in four years should think hard before leaving the IB — but so do admission windows, sibling policy, and whether a place exists in the specific year group you need rather than the school in general. We visit, ask the questions parents are too polite to ask, and tell you where the waiting list is real and where it is a formality.
The mistakes that cost the most
- Signing a lease before the school place is confirmed. The most expensive error in executive relocation, and the most common. The house can be found again; the place cannot.
- Treating the commute as a detail. An excellent area that adds an hour a day to the family's life will be resented within a term.
- Splitting the job between suppliers. The lawyer, the search agent and the school consultant each do their part well and none of them owns the calendar, so the delays only become visible when they collide.
- Underestimating the accompanying partner. Most relocations that fail, fail because the partner had nothing planned. Introductions, language and a network are part of the mandate, not an afterthought.
What we deliberately do not do
- We do not file immigration applications. That work belongs to Spanish lawyers, whom we introduce and whose deadlines we track.
- We do not give tax advice. Residency has tax consequences in two countries at once; your advisers should own that question and we will make sure they are asked it early.
- We do not take commissions from landlords or schools. You pay us, so our recommendation is worth something.
- We do not take on a move we cannot deliver. Where the timetable is impossible, we say so in the first reply rather than after the deposit.
Who the service is for
Executives taking a Madrid role
A start date that will not move, a family arriving later, and no time to manage the move personally.
Families relocating for residency
Where the permit route, the property and the schooling have to be decided together rather than in sequence.
Companies moving a leadership team
Several households at once, with one point of contact for HR and consistent treatment across families.
Principals opening a second base
Madrid as one of several homes, with the property, staff and diary run alongside the rest of the year.
Where the move is part of a wider structure — assets in more than one country, a diary split across markets — the relocation usually sits inside a private office mandate in Madrid rather than standing on its own. Our current reading of the residency landscape is in the strategic residency analysis in the KAIROS Journal.