There are two ways to think about lettings
· We love our landlords because they pay us money.
· We love our landlords, and sometimes there's a transaction.
The second is very different indeed from the first.
In the first case, landlords are the means to an end, profit. In the second, the lettings agency exists to serve landlords, and profit is just a great side effect.
It's easy to argue that without compensation, there can be no service. Taking that to an extreme, though, working to every screw ever landlord with hidden fees or extras to get the profit up of each property let rarely works in the long term. If you seek to charge above average fees for below average lettings service, your landlords will discover this, and let the world know. In a free market with plenty of information, it's very hard to succeed merely by loving the money your landlords pay you.
I think it's interesting to note that some of the most successful letting agents in the UK got there by focusing obsessively on service, viewing the fee’s as an afterthought or a side effect. As marketing gets more and more expensive, it turns out that caring for landlords (and in a roundabout way tenants) is a useful shortcut to trust, which leads to all the other things that a growing organisation seeks.
Your landlords can tell... but can you Mr(s) letting agent?