 movies are thoroughly misleading for one important reason. It’s not the main character’s nocturnal habit of kneecapping petty crooks that stretches credulity — but the roles and responsibilities of his butler sidekick. In the recent trilogy, Alfred, played by Michael Caine, is seen performing the duties of chef, chauffeur, cleaner, nanny, therapist, life coach, executive assistant, travel agent, property developer, IT troubleshooter, private doctor, PR agent, international smuggler and criminal underworld expert. This elderly man does all of these highly-skilled tasks on his own, 24 hours a day, without rest. And they say Christopher Nolan’s superhero films were grittily authentic.

Alfred, Gotham’s great master of trades, was under-scrutinised by most audiences — except, perhaps, for those working in a small industry called estate management. This is a niche but growing profession servicing ultra high net worth individuals. They are the most important figures in the downstairs hierarchy, and take ultimate responsibility for the running of a large multi-property family.

Let’s say you’re a nought-point-nought-one percenter. You need roughly one housekeeper for every 1,500 square feet of mansion that you own. If you want 24-hour service, then you need three housekeepers working in shifts. Once you add up all the other personal trainers, make-up stylists, gardeners, drivers, and cooks — again multiplying everything by three if you want round-the-clock help — then you could quickly find yourself with an army of 20 household employees. And that could be just for your pad in Beverly Hills. You might also have a beach house on St Barts, a ski lodge in Aspen, a townhouse in Manhattan and a yacht the size of a 

-class aircraft carrier. As you and your retinue move between each residence, you need someone to make sure there is gold-leaf soap in every bathroom, that your cigar humidor is humming along at 67 percent, and that your Nebuchadnezzars of Armand de Brignac Rose are chilled to 9C exactly.

That’s where your estate manager comes in. They make sure your life, with all its houses and staff and hundreds of different WiFi codes, runs smoothly. Estate managers are the unsung string-pullers of the extremely rich. They have Herculean reserves of energy, patience, and creativity. In conversations with the 

, estate managers have opened the staff-only door on their elite profession. It looks, from an outsider’s perspective, a strange and dizzying life. Work never ends on time – you always have to be on hand to answer a 3am phone call about how to turn on the infinity pool lights or get Netflix on the 12-seater home cinema. It’s an incredibly well paid profession — annual salaries can be around $300,000 — and it involves being familiar with fantastic luxury. But you also have to deal with billionaires, so your answer to everything must always be ‘yes’. You will need to be on your feet at all times, typically walking around 20,000 steps a day. Could you hack it?

, says the job requires expertise in a number of different fields. Before reaching the top of her game, she worked as a nanny and private chef, cooking onboard a charter yacht. She now runs a top-tier estate management firm — the clients she is allowed to mention include Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Sir Nick Faldo, the professional golfer. Varney neatly describes the job of an estate manager as “choreographing the movements of the house”. That means repainting one house while the family is staying in a different one, tidying the bedrooms when breakfast is being served, and making sure pool cleaners are finished before anyone wants to swim.

"Your job is to solve problems and that is the only thing that matters..."

Varney describes it as a rewarding but gruelling job. “It is 24 hours a day and they never want to know you’re there,” she says. “You might hear their conversations but you act like you don’t hear anything. Your job is to solve problems and that is the only thing that matters.” Principals, as they are called, might call up at any time asking for help with their properties and assets, so Varney has recorded walkthrough clips of all the things that might go wrong with the cars, the espresso machine, and the hot tub. That way, when her principal calls up from their yacht in the Med urgently asking how to turn the bubbles on in the Jacuzzi, she can easily respond with a how-to video.

Estate managers are the COOs of the house, Varney explains. “It is an administrative role. Someone has to manage all those people — the butler, the nanny, the chef.” The job involves big projects like implementing a principal’s new construction project and hiring, training, and supervising all the domestic staff. But it can also require getting stuck into the little things if the principal asks. “I have to know how to drive the Ferrari if it needs to be moved, charter a plane, how to make lunch,” she says. If the principal asks, it’s the estate manager’s job to make it happen, no matter what they ask for. “They can have this mentality of ‘you can get whatever you want’,” she says. “Someone will see something in a magazine or while walking down the street. It happened once where my client said to me, ‘I want that guy’s shoes’ and I had to ask go over to him and ask ‘Excuse me, sir, where did you get those shoes?’” That kind of role would normally be done by a personal assistant, Varney says, but it’s the estate manager’s job to be ready for anything.

Kimberley Varney of Celebrity Estate Management: &#8220;We choreograph the movements of the house”


She once had to travel to a village in Mexico to find a shaman and fly him over because her principal wanted to have lunch with him. She has had to negotiate the rights to the air around a mansion – her principal wanted to buy a mile of atmosphere above his home so that nobody else would ever build on it and spoil his view. The biggest job she describes was hosting a giant corporate bash that sounds more complicated than the filming of 

. It was a dinner party held on three continents at once — and it had to be identical in every way. The ingredients and dishes had to be the same — even the linen, candles, and music had to match. A big-name chef from Washington D.C. trained a team of cooks so they could fly overseas and whip up the same menu of pea puree foam and Wagyu short rib braised in miso. “It was the longest day I’ve ever worked,” she says. “27 hours.”

The wealth at her principals’ disposal is eye-watering. Varney says annual budgets are “one hundred times what you would imagine”. That kind of money can lead to some incredibly specific tastes. A principal she has worked with had a six-figure budget just for candles. The client loved a particular type of fancy candle that costs $125. The house had to be filled with these candles and replaced as they burnt out, which amounted to an annual bill of $100,000 for transient smells. That’s before the staff and the private jet, not to mention the designer wardrobe, the extensive landscaping, the daily groceries to feed the children’s Beluga caviar addiction, and the insurance that ties the whole operation together. It’s a reminder of that scene in 

, where the profligate main character’s restaurant expenses are questioned by his accountant: “$26,000 worth of sides? What are these sides? Do they cure cancer?”

"One mananger had to travel to a village in Mexico to find a shaman..."

But let’s be clear — if you have enough money to hire an estate manager, a hundred grand on candles is nothing. Kelly Dixon, who runs

 — a tech company that designs software to manage properties — sums up her career with a phrase so punchy it should be written on her business cards. “I’ve only worked for billionaires,” she says. Dixon, who was the estate manager of Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder, says the scale of her job was “like standing on a cliff and diving into the abyss”. The example that she uses was that in her world, security is not provided by rent-a-cop schlubs in ill-fitting uniforms but ex-FBI directors.

Principals have so much money that they are now wired differently. We tend to think of having extreme wealth as the freedom to buy better versions of things we might already have, like more expensive clothes and food and cars. But an estate manager’s principals are thinking on a different scale. Varney has known ultra high net worthers hiring their own music producers, motorcycle mechanics, and potters – who come to live in the house and serve the client.

Estate management, as you might have gathered by now, is not for the faint of heart. It takes an iron resolve and Sisyphean perseverance to make it in this industry. Peter Van Ryder, a former estate manager from Texas who helps principals hire new staff, says the vetting process is extensive. His process at

 involves background checks, deep screening, and behavioural analysis (of body language) to ensure that potential candidates are being honest. “We are not trying to trip anybody up or make them uncomfortable, we are trying to catch deception,” he says. These tests are to tease out a hidden criminal conviction in the past that a candidate might be trying to withhold, the cover-up being worse than the crime itself.

"We go by the maxim: 'a butler is interested, not interesting.'"

The Help Company, a jobs board for the very rich, offers an insight into the sort of qualities you need. Not even the elite Navy SEALs who assassinated Osama bin Laden boasted all the attributes needed for this job: “Hard working, tidy, flexible, calm under pressure, organised and thorough, all-rounder and team player, no ego.”

One listing for an estate manager role that was principally based in New York had no fewer than 15 types of complex responsibility. An example: “Oversee all events and dinner parties, including coordinating with guests and their preferences, event set up and take down, working as a team with chef and sommelier”. Another: “Schedule, supervise and upkeep of maintenance schedules for household vendors: landscapers, HVAC, electrician, plumbing, etc”. And finally, the most ominous task of all: “Establish friendly relationship with children and assist in scheduling and executing their activities.”

Kelly Dixon of Estate Management Systems: “I’ve only worked for billionaires&#8230;&#8221;


Requirements for this role are 10 years’ experience in estate management, excellent HR skills, savvy knowledge of the construction industry, high emotional intelligence, and the flexibility to give up evenings and weekends.

A request of estate managers that frequently appears on the job postings is “know when to disappear”. One ad calling for an estate manager job based in Bel Air, with properties all over the world, stipulated candidates should understand “old world etiquette, discretion and humility” and would “need to let things roll off your back”. It might be uncharitable, but this advert conjured up an image of a 1930s newspaper ad recruiting secretaries for Adolf Hitler’s private office. “Bilinguals preferred, ability to ignore war crimes a must.”

Van Ryder explains that while the biggest ego in the house is the principal, estate managers have to “check our egos at the door”. He says that the job frequently involves telling the boss that things aren’t going to plan. “We rarely get to deliver good news to our principals,” he says. “‘This pipe burst, this statue got broken, the renovation just went up another $30,000.’” While the principal may have an “explosive reaction to a negative situation”, as long as their outburst isn’t personally attacking the estate manager, then Van Ryder advises his mentees to let it slide. However: “I will say that abusive and inappropriate behaviour is never acceptable, no matter who you are.”

That Bel Air ad looks like an extreme example. But Varney says in addition to leadership skills and linear thinking, you do have to want to serve people. “You need to have a lot of tolerance for lots of different types of people,” she says. “You might love your boss but not get along with his wife. You have to make everyone feel welcome whether or not you approve of what’s happening.”

“Money cures one set of stresses — but it adds a dozen others..."

Van Ryder says this is why estate management can be “a very isolating business”, reciting Charles MacPhersons’s maxim that “a butler is interested, not interesting”. He says: “The butler is there when you need them but you never see them, they are part of the wallpaper.” For this reason, he says, many of those in estate management are introverts. While it might seem to outsiders like a gruelling profession, Van Ryder says estate management can provide a lot of satisfaction. First, there’s being behind the velvet rope: “How many people get to fly in private jets and not have to pay for it?” Second, there’s a more ephemeral reward to be had from delivering perfect service. “I absolutely love stepping back after setting up a table for a party,” he says, “and taking a look and all the crystal is in line, all the silverware is set correctly, all the plates are perfectly in line and symmetrical and beautiful. I can say I made that happen.”

Dixon says that estate management is not a job where you can expect a high level of praise. She recalls planning a big weekend event for her principal and their guests. It was executed with all the precision of an amphibious landing, and she coordinated florists, interior decorators, IT experts, sommeliers and chefs. “It took us I don’t know how many hours,” she remembers. “The weekend concludes and I hear from the principal that everything went well, except the candle wicks weren’t trimmed. You really have to learn you’re not going to be getting pats on the back or any sense that you’re doing a great job from anyone other than yourself.”

Estate managers might work to coordinate the lives of their principals, but they are also expected to retreat into the background with the speed of a magician disappearing in a puff of smoke. “Anything that intrudes their privacy on any sensory level could be considered inappropriate,” Dixon says. A leather shoe that squeaks with every step is out of the question, so are high heels which might clack on a hardwood floor.

That means estate managers need thin shoes and thick skin. But they also need to be smooth operators among the other private staff. Dixon stresses to the estate managers she works with that they have to work as a team to prevent rivalries. It is not uncommon, she says, for the housekeepers, who might come into closer contact with the principals, to withhold useful information from estate managers just to make their lives difficult. Ensuring that nobody feels threatened by the presence of another member of staff is crucial. Information about what the principal wants is the currency of private service, and because they might be surrounded by personal and office staff, Dixon says estate managers can sometimes battle through “multiple layers just to ask what the principal wants for dinner”.

Despite their profession, it is interesting that the estate managers don’t yearn to live the billionaire lifestyle of their principals. Van Ryder says gold-plated wealth can be “isolating” and can damage friendships. “Money cures one set of stresses,” he says, “but adds a dozen others.” And Dixon, if she were a billionaire, says she would not want an estate manager of her own. On a recent stay in a swish hotel in Egypt, she experienced a taste of being waited on by two dozen staff, being greeted at every turn, having her drink topped up any time she took a sip. “That anticipatory-needs service drove me crazy,” she says. “It’s annoying to have someone think twenty steps ahead of you. You’ve paid this person to come up with all these different options you don’t even want.”

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