How To Get More People To Use Your Lettings and Estate Agency Blog

I have a number of people who have expressed interest in joining one of my courses in the New Year to help them grow their lettings agency business (and estate agency if appropriate).  Following feedback from previous attendees, the course will now be run over two days and have more content. During the course, on top of what was covered in the previous course, attendees will set up their own blog during the course, instead of just learning to write the articles, they will also write their own articles. The residential sales leaflet will shown and written, which in early trials is proving popular in obtaining valuable sales business.  Therefore, the date of the course is  Thursday 22 nd  January/ Friday 23rd January 2015.   The maximum number attendees is six . The lunchtime food, coffee and cold drinks during the daytime course is included. The attendees will responsible for their overnight accommodation costs. Bed and breakfast rate at the Hotel we a...

...... and they can restrain our ability to network, grow and work well.  Stereotypes, however, are not inherently bad—rather, they give someone a reference point to inform them during a new situation. Holding too tightly to a stereotype is the problem. Much of the public continue to view us in traditional ways, and even tar letting agents with the same brush.   Dismissing the existence of estate agency stereotypes will not get them to disappear. As a result, a critical part of networking as agents involves quickly dispelling those stereotypes as you interact with people or other groups and market yourself.  How? Stop talking yourself, stop talking about what you have sold or let this week, how cheap your fee’s are or what professional bodies you belong to .. talk about something that interests your potential clients (be they landlords or home sellers)  ... the local property market .. like these people do .... DERBY PROPERTY BLOG http://l...

I don’t think there’s a shortage of letting agents who want to grow and flourish. I think the lettings agency business has plenty of great opportunities for agents to grow or new entrants to start and grow...  It’s the will of those agents to realise the world has changed and until agents realise they themselves need to be remarkable in what they do, to get even the attention of landlords, let alone their interest, thus breaking through the apathy of a landlord  .. you will never get a landlord to even realise you AREN'T just another agent, let alone ring you or even swap agents

Competition is the lifeblood of estate and letting agency business.... stop worrying about them and start worrying how you can get yourself more free valuations and market appraisals .. because it is these that determine if they beat you or you beat them. Keep smiling! .... that's enough smiling .. go get me some free vals!  

If you are a new start up letting or estate agency, the most important thing is not to let the lack of money get you down. Start up agents are successful (or not) on morale, not money. If you let the issue of getting the money kill your morale, it will become a self fulfilling prophecy.

Letting and Estate Agents don’t often command much respect, do they? Modern Letting and Estate Agents have created a business model so opaque that landlords, vendors, tenants and buyers don’t really understand all the work done by Letting and Estate Agency staff. The result is that they often don’t value us the way they should. In the future, the idea of Letting and Estate Agents, on the High Street, as physical space MIGHT be vague or nonexistent with the onslaught on the online agents .  The way High Street agents can avoid this is by better educating all our stakeholders, especially our landlords and vendors about the role of modern agents, our vision for the future, and how the management of property and the selling of property brings value to them. The ability to network is critical in a social work environment, whether that’s a Letting and Estate Agency who is a corporate, an independent Letting and Estate Agency, High Street, Hybrid or even online a corporate or a...

Ok, you have decided to write your blog, a blog about your local property market because this guy says it will get you more landlords flooding to your door .. and because most agents are a competitive bunch, you want to be great at it, you want your blog to be the best. But here is the problem,  it’s not like we get a lot of direct (and honest) opinions about how great we actually are… I mean, in the real world, your mates and family will tell you that you are the best. Yes, you will always get the vampires and ‘scumsuckingpondlife’ that will tell you that you’re rubbish, but you ignore them, or do you? The problem is, but I find in life, the negative comments  always seem to stick more than the positive ones, and the things your friends say … well, they just don’t have the guts to say anything bad. So how can you find out for sure? (I don’t know about you, but the misery of losing a property to the competitor is much deeper than the happiness of getting the instructio...

... Will what you post on Linkedin do the following ???  Help someone OR  make someone laugh OR  make someone think OR   make someone change OR most importantly be genuinely interesting to the reader (and not just you, your boss and your Mum ... eg look what we have done/won/sold/let) ....because if it doesnt do any of those things..  Why are exactly are you posting?  Social media is just a form of communication, it is what you and I would say face to face, but just put down on a computer screen. The only thing landlords are interested in....

Any agent who thinks that cheap fees is the future needs to take a moment, shower in cold water , open their eyes and take a good look at the real world. Cheap fees has been an issue faced by agents since the dawn of time. It is not new and is not going away.   It is very frustrating to have an established agency business, with established pricing and profit margins only to have some whippersnapper.... ... start up (more than likely running it from his bedroom to save costs on office space and staff) , a  one man band or big box Foxton’sesque chain to mess up the marketplace with their 0% opening deals. A lot of agents feel that is the future and it will be a future of scraping together a paltry living as everyone struggles against the cheap fee agents. We are all doomed! Or are we?...Sorry peeps ..Nothing is further from the truth. In most cases facing a cheap fee agent is a sales issue.  The problem is very few agents train their Valuers and Lis...

We don't usually use that proverb, but it's true.  Trading in your principles in order to gain short term listings by cheap fees is not as easy as it looks. Once great and respected brands, like C&A, Ratners, Comet and Woolworth’s that rushed to deliver low price at all costs had to figure out which corners to cut, and in the process, fooled themselves into thinking they could get away with it forever. Fellow agents, if you drop your fee, what corners are you going to cut? Yes, you can have cheaper paper, cheaper staff and cheaper cars .. but there comes a point where if you get any cheaper, your brochures will be tissue paper and you can’t run an agency on apprentices alone. As the bottom gets more and more crowded, it's harder than ever to be more myopic or shortsighted than every other agent.   .. and that will get even harder and harder as time goes on. If it’s going to be hard work as time goes on, you might as well put the effort into racing t...

Blogspot website = Nil Linkedin Account = Zilch Facebook Account = Nothing Getting thousands of email addresses of landlords in your town/city = Diddly Squat The websites where you can find the information about your local property market = Zero pennies Writing articles about the local property market = Not one pound .. OK, so it’s fair to say, apart from your time, the costs are pretty low.  But, that aside, forgetting the low cost .... what if that cost was dwarfed by the huge cost of not trying to write articles about your local property market? What if the 40+ letting agents who have kindly given testimonials on Linkedin about how they have published these articles about their local property market, are correct in when they say it has vastly improved their lettings business? It isn’t voodoo magic .. talk about the local property market in an interesting way to local landlords and whilst it isn’t not overnight, but after a few months, landlords will start t...

In the estate agency and lettings game nothing is more important to your business as free valuations (.... and when I say free valuations, I also mean market appraisals).   To have a viable estate agency and lettings business, you must have those free valuations.   Without free valuations you will have no business and therefore you need lots of them.   Funny but some estate agents and lettings agents miss this quite obvious point end up spending their time on other less financially rewarding activities.   Why do they do this? I have no idea, I really don’t.   But let us be brutally clear about this, no free valuations equals no properties to sell (or let) .... equals no money coming in ..... equals financial ruin.    I might even be as bold to say that you aren’t an estate agent or letting agent .... but you are in the free valuation generation business.   Say that phrase to many agents and they will say they are an estate agent to which ...