Monsieur le letting agent (or for the ladies, Madam la letting agent) - if you are one of 20, 30, 40, 80, 130
letting agents in your town or City, how the hell are you going to make your
lettings agency stand out from the crowd? Well the first thing you need to do
is make them aware of you. Once they are aware, then you need to capture their
attention. How do you do that? .. easy. If you want to capture the attention of
landlords who use the other agents in town, it’s simple if you enter the discussions and conversations
already taking place inside the heads of those landlords.
How many times as a
lettings agent have you thought you and your lettings team are so ace and
brilliant, your service is second to none, you go the extra mile or two –none
of this one mile lark, hey your lettings service should sell it sell itself? Well sorry, but here is what I
think ... great letting agents are a two a penny. Even well executed great letting
agents are on every agents row, but that doesn’t mean they’re successful in the
marketplace. The best agents, their service and the message they give out talk
to landlords about things they are already wanting and thinking about. They
address niggly things that have been lurking under the surface. They solve problems
that landlords have been laying awake at night wondering about and worrying
about. Or another way of putting it, letting agents talk about landlords’ wants,
needs, loves and worries
So what
do landlords want, need, love and worry about? Well let’s look at the negatives
first (ie worries). Trashing of property by tenants and non payment of rent are
normally at the top of the list. Now if you were the only agent that took
references and offered rent guarantee insurance .. you would be laughing all
the way to the bank. But every agent does that. And let’s be honest, whatever
happens to the property after the tenant has up’d and gone – you Monsieur (or
Madame) Letting Agent are going to get the blame. Finally though, how many landlords
worry at 4am in the morning if the rent is going to paid?
Now for
the positives (wants, needs and most importantly, loves). A very practical
example of getting your message out there is online marketing and if you are
new you will need to found .. so let’s start with search engines, and the daddy
of them all is Google. Google adwords are a very, very powerful way to obtain
new landlords, so the people that sell you Google Adword campaigns tell you. But
how many existing landlords with existing properties with existing letting
agents type in to Google ...’letting agents in Leicester’ . lots of tenants will be looking for
property will type that in, but how many Leicester landlords? Probably the same
number of people who type in the phrase to Google ‘change my bank account’ ..
nil divided by the square root of nothing.
What
about social media Chris? I say in return, how many 40 to 70 year old middle
class males with middle management jobs or running their own firm (the typical
profile of a landlord) have a Facebook book account, or even a Twitter account?
They might have a Linkedin account but never log on to it. ..... you see I
believe Social media for lettings is a complete and utter waste of time ...
But every
40 to 70 year old middle class male has an email account. What if I could show
you a way to get the email addresses of most of the landlords in your town? It doesn’t involve land registry nor trawling
the portals. What if I could show you how to get the email addresses of those
landlords in your town .. then you have a direct link to them? Now send them
stuff about what’s already going on in their head. If you are an agent in say Leicester,
most of your landlords will live within 10 miles of Leicester, and all
Leicester landlords will want to know how much his or her Leicester property is
worth? What’s happening to the Leicester property market? What’s happening to
Leicester rents? What’s happening to Leicester yields? Where is the best place
in Leicester for yields? Which is the next up and coming area of Leicester for
capital growth? Is the next door town of Loughborough or Coalville better for
BTL, when compared with Leicester? That
Leicester landlord couldn’t give a monkeys about what is happening in
Nottingham or Derby, let alone London or the UK property market.
However,
if you were a letting agent in Nottingham, most of your landlords will live
within 10 miles of Nottingham and will ask the same questions that landlord in
Leicester did .. but about Nottingham instead .. and if they lived in Battersea,
the Battersea landlords would be interested in the Battersea housing market or
Richmond property market for Richmond landlords or Ealing for Ealing landlords
... that’s all landlords care about.
They
don’t care about s.8, s.21, s13 notices – that’s what they pay you for. They
know they are wanted by other agents, so aren’t interested in your cr*ppy
‘landlords wanted adverts’, they don’t care you have hundreds of tenants
waiting – their property already has a tenant in it, they don’t care your fees
are 6% when they are currently paying 10% because if they moved half way
through the tenancy, they wouldn’t save money, it cost them money as they would
have to pay off the existing agent as well as paying you ........ all landlords
care about (in fact the same could be said for everyone in this world), all landlords care about is themselves.
People (aka landlords) are only interested in what interest’s them – it isn’t
your cheap fees, it isn’t your free buy to let advice (because nothing is free
in this world and you will only try and sell me something), it isn’t you are
(or not) ARLA qualified. All they care about is getting their rent and making
sure the tenant doesn’t trash the place.
But talk
about what is of interest to a landlord and that landlord will accept you into
their head, which is the biggest hurdle of them all. That’s what I do.... I
write awesome content / articles about your local property market then together
I show you how to get that uber interesting content / articles in front of the
eyeballs of your local landlords via email, via newsletters, via newspapers,
via blogs. It doesn’t get results straight away and getting those 1000’s of email
addresses is especially bloody hard work. It takes a shed load of patience ..
but if you are in this lettings game for the long term then what’s a few months
of groundwork to get 20%, even 30% growth in a year.
Sounds fanciful.. it isn’t
... I have proved it so many times .. just look at the testimonials
I have .... http://www.christopherwatkin.co.uk/testimonials.html .
Landlord Farming Part 1
(3 mins)
Landlord Farming Part 2
(3 mins)
Is it 100% guaranteed? Do be so bl**dy daft ... of course it isn't, but if you look at testimonials, is not bad at all, not bad at all ... depend sif you wnat to put the hard work into it?