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Showing posts from April, 2015

What if letting agent fees do get banned?

What are you going to replace those tenant fees? One option is charging your landlords more? But what if your landlords wont pay? Can you afford to lose them? Can you still make a profit being a letting agent? If the answer is No to any of those questions and its making you have cold sweats, I then I have the answer.  You better start to get yourself more landlords ... No landlord will ever use a letting agent they don’t trust, in fact no solicitor, banker, IFA, mortgage arranger, no professional can sell any service to anyone, if that buyer doesn’t trust the person they are buying from. Ever since the dawn of Victorian commerce the principles of building trust have never changed. However, the way and strategy of how you do build trust in today's tinterweb world has changed.  You see trust is the number one commodity to have in life, let alone business. Before the tinterweb world started, trust was built face to face where all the fine distinctions and subt

Does landlord farming work?

Jeremy Bullock, letting agent in Derbyshire, has been publishing articles about his local property market for over 12 months, putting them in the newspaper, newsletters and his blog .. and now is CONSISTENTLY  getting at least 4 new landlords EVERY MONTH bring him property to let  ... 4 new landlords, every month, worth at least £4000 a year in fees ... This is his blog  http://www.jeremys-property-blog.blogspot.co.uk/ This is an example of one of his newsletters   Let him tell you why he is getting, each and every month FOUR new landlords, MONTH IN MONTH OUT without fail, DIRECTLY from writing these articles.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5LTcaeUHtak ..INDIRECTLY,  he believes he gets other news business from the technique I can teach you how to write these articles on a 2 day course in getting more landlords or I can ghost write them for you. Want know what Landlord Farming is?  These two THREE minutes videos tell you how its done Ca

£83,500 = The Value of each Market Appraisal?

You have a market appraisal booked in at 2.30pm. You were meaning to get everything sorted this morning for the appraisal , but you needed to sort that deposit dispute this morning. You have done market appraisals hundreds of times before .. you can do them with your eyes closed. As you are going to meet the landlord at his property, you might do a bit of homework (quick 30 second scan on Rightmove Plus), grab your landlord brochures and a couple of business cards. No need to look at the Comps, you know your prices. If you get it, it will earn you £1,250 a year in fees in a year (obviously the further South you go, this figure goes up and drops as you go up North). So if you bag it, that property will earn you £1,250. For you and your lettings agency, that’s not a huge deal, and it isn’t a small deal either. It’s just slightly larger than your average deal with a landlord. So you treat this £1,250 deal like it is no big deal. But what if you looked at the deal through another

If I match the fee, will you stay with my agency?

You have managed to land that landlord   and he or she is going to swap letting agents to you, then it all to goes   t*ts up and he/she changes her mind and stays put? Ring a bell? Let me tell you a story which might ring true. Jason ( he of the Shiny Suit and Senior Lettings Neg at your competition .. I mean Senior.. come on.. his Linkedin profile say he has been in lettings for seventeen months and you can work out he is only twenty and three quarters ...... name changed to protect the innocent!!!!!) rang up your new landlord and said, “If we can match the deal you got at the new letting agent, can we get you to stay?"  You know the landlord didn't leave because of a better fee, but to get the business, you still did this new landlord a cracking introductory fee when he left them to come to you.  The landlord told you that the old agent explained that matching the rate was a nice gesture, but it was not the reason he left.   At this point, he thought Jason was

What is a Good Conversion rate?

OK, todays article appears to be more geared to our estate agency friends .. but if you often go out on market apprisials, you will learn alot from this. One of the issues that I am often asked about is how to improve conversion rates.  Now, I am not an agency trainer .. so you need to talk to the most excellent Sam Ashdown and   Stephen Brown to tell you HOW to improve a conversion rate   .. but what I can tell you is in my humble opinion WHY your conversion rate isn’t good enough. Ask any Lister and Valuer why their conversion rate is not as good as others, and the answers will include... “Our fee’s too expensive.” “We’ve never sold that type of property before.” “I never knew the choice of agent had to be approved by his or her wife/husband / father/ mother/ cousin three times removed.” “The landlord / vendor just doesn’t get it. I don’t understand it – he / she really needs our agency.”   “He never told me that newspaper adv