Page 9 – The software for estate & letting agents.

August 1, 2012

Internet Marketing for Letting Agents

Hi again and welcome to the second installment of internet marketing tips for letting and estate agents. Last week I discussed all things Pay per click and weighed up the pros and cons of investing your marketing dollar into paid search advertising. This week I planned on continuing discussion on search but after the last blog was covered by Agent Media over in the UK I came across a great post on how to use Facebook for agencies and wanted to delve into this area further as I have read a LOT of literature on the topic of social networks.

Image courtesy of Mashable

The blog mentions that the majority of company pages fail as they don’t understand or know what to do on the page and this is a point reinforced from a Digital Marketing talk I attended in April from Avril Fagan the head of digital at Sage Ireland. When it came to social media and social network sites such as Facebook the question was asked should a brand do it or not? There is no right or wrong answer according to Avril but the important thing to note is if your going to do it , do it right and commit to it or as she described ‘once your in there is no going back!’. And that’s where this list can really help letting & estate agents setting up and maintaining their Facebook page.The list provided in the blog above covers everything you need to or can do when setting up your Facebook. Below I want to discuss in general how an agency might use Facebook to maximise your return on investment.

Image courtesy of Alltopstartups.com

If we take a second to think of why people use social network sites like Facebook we will quickly learn why you cant solely use it to promote your agency and its properties or services. People are there to build social relationships with others, so for a company or a brand to come in and attempt to directly advertise or connect with customers it can be difficult. The two main uses I identified from reading publications on the use of social networks like Facebook are customer service (information exchange, discussion, communication and participation) and Viral media opportunities which are actually closely linked to one another.

So discussion is one of the main marketing benefits you can take from setting up a Facebook page for your agency, the more you engage the more people will find your page as they see there friends and colleagues have commented or shared items from your agency page. As Ian mentioned in the blog posting relevant questions and photos will encourage such activity- how to come up with this content is another days discussion but understanding the benefits of doing so is important. If your agency is showing up in a followers news feed (Where their friends see your brand) due to a like/comment/share on content from your page like a photo or video it adds credibility to the content as it is not directly from you. Research has shown that receivers of information related to a company are much more accepting when coming from a friend.

Once you build that social relationship with your followers it will become easier and easier to spread your content virally. Just look at Paddy Power above, although its completely different industry, they rarely ever advertise their services or odds on their Facebook. Instead it is full of humorous images and interesting statuses, quizzes, videos that people like and share every day, generating a huge buzz and a growing reach. So weather it is landlords, tenants or other property professionals your engaging with this is the type of strategy I think you should be aiming for, although it certainly isn’t easy to do!

Thats all for today, plenty more to get through with this topic so look out for more next week, dont forget you can click ‘like’ below to share onto Facebook or Twitter and let us know what you think.

by Rentview

Letting agency software

July 31, 2012

Video Blog-Cormac speaks on the benefits of adding tenants to Rentview

This is the latest of the Rentview video blogs where I take you through the top benefits of uploading your tenants onto the Rentview system. As many of you are aware Rentview differentiates itself from other software solutions with its unique tenant and landlord features available due to the the software operating on the cloud.

I note the various benefits a tenant receives such as the online lease, the utility set up, online inventory and statement of rents paid and due and an end of tenancy reference. I also note the benefits to the agency as you can manage your database with more ease & efficiency as well as the end of lease benefits such as retention and word of mouth marketing.

Enjoy the video and ignore the few stumbles and interesting facial expressions I like to make, the video blogs are a new area in which we look to create useful content that’s easier to digest and more appealing for engagement.

Video Blog – Uploading tenants details to your Rentview.com account from Rentview on Vimeo.

Be sure to click the ‘LIKE’ button below to share this onto your Facebook or Twitter or drop us a comment with your thoughts below & tweet @Rentview_

Cormac

July 27, 2012

How to generate additional revenues for your rental agency

Andreas video blogging on how Rentview.com can assist your rental agency convert more let only clients to your full let and management services.

The current stats would show that only 1 in 4 landlords choose the full let and management services rather than just the let only package. We understand this and have developed a way of promoting your management services to your landlords. Take a look at the video blog and let us know what you think.

As always we would love to hear your feedback.

Please feel free to Tweet, Share, Like and everything else that makes us social 😉

Andreas Riha

Video Blog – How to generate additional revenue for your rental agency through Rentview.com from Rentview on Vimeo.

July 25, 2012

Internet Marketing for Letting and Estate Agents

Hi guys Cormac here with a new blog on some creative and effective marketing tips for agents. During my year writing a dissertation on viral marketing and social networks I’ve picked up some useful tips on their purpose for businesses online strategy. The attitudes of the consumer (for example your targeted landlords/tenants) are completely different to what they were five years ago. The way i like to describe it is the hunter has become the hunted. What I mean by this is that no longer are we standing still and brands/marketers/companies shout their marketing messages and push advertisements in our faces but we decide exactly what we want to engage with. The power of TV and newspaper continues to fall as we spend more time online and become more attached to hand held devices.

What does this mean?

So the consumer is now the one looking for the brand, once they decide what they need they will go online and start researching what available, they wont be listening to the radio when they have the I-pod blaring and they wont be seeing your ads when there reading the news on their latest phone app. So what an agency needs to do is increase its presence online. There is a wide range of areas you can engage in when implementing an online strategy as you can see from the infographic below complements of alltopstartups.

Today i’m gong to discuss part one of the online marketing strategy which is search engine marketing. Search marketing is broken into two areas SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and Pay Per Click advertising. This is one of the number one ways to market your agencies website as your targeted audiences are heading to Google every day to search for the services they need such as rented accomadation and letting or management services

Many of you will be aware of the Google Adwords platform as it is the main money making facility for Google so its marketed heavily to everyone and anyone on the internet. It is what really kicked off the online marketing buzz but in my opinion its benefits are slowly stagnating as more and more companies use its service. Why is it losing its appeal? Well you have to pick ‘keywords’ related to your industry for where you want your ads to appear, for example your doing a campaign targeted to Landlords you may choose ‘property management Dublin’ , ‘letting services in Cork’ etc , the more specific the better. However since the influx in companies using the services the costs of using such popular keywords are rising as companies bid against one another for the most common searched terms.

In reality there is only so many words that are relevant for an agent so it may get to the point where you are bidding more then you should or choosing ineffective search terms. What this means is you need to focus on natural search marketing known or as i referred to above SEO , search engine optimisation, Avril Fagan the head of Digital marketing at Sage Ireland describes this as the holy grail of search. It involves creating content relevant to your industry, website optimisation of key-words, meta-tags and much more that I will cover in the next blog.

by Rentview

July 24, 2012

Product Development: Partial Payments on Rentview

How to record a partial rental payment from Rentview on Vimeo.

Welcome to the latest product development blog where today i’m going to give you a quick update on our latest property management software feature set to go live this week.

Receiving a partial rent payment

When you are managing rental payments, you make get some tenants who don’t pay the full rent amount each month. We spoke to agencies who were having this problem and now the Rentview platform allows and agency to record and manage partial rent payments.

Example of Rent schedule : In this case the rent due is €800 from the tenant as per the rent schedule image below.

Unfortunately the tenant has only come up with €700 in rent for July’s payment meaning the €100 will have to be paid at a later date, previously on the software you would have to add a new payment term to manage this issue. Now with partial payments it automatically alters the payment schedule:

Above : Marking the payment of €700 received on time (20Th July 2012)

Below : The new and updated Rent Schedule – €100 Rent arrears due

Thats it for now, like to keep the product development blogs short, for more information visit the website and make sure to follow Rentview on Twitter. Thanks to Colin for the help on this one too. Goodbye , Cormac!

July 23, 2012

Property Management Blog: Pest Control – How to avoid Rats and Mice

Today im going to blog about one of the most common pests that landlords, tenants and property managers have to deal with in rented accommodation. That is rats and mice, there are many other rodents and insects a property manager may encounter and the best way to handle these will be covered over the next few weeks. Our friends at Owlspestcontrol have been kind enough to provided us with some great information on such problems and how to deal with them.

No 1 – Mus Domesticus and Rattus Norvegicus (AKA Mice and Rats)

Mice/Rats breed quickly so these are some of the top guys you don’t want to see on your property. They are attracted to properties due to obvious reasons such as food/water as they are the ultimate scavengers.

To deal with mice and rats you can take the following simple steps in your rental accommodation:

Remove the food!!, no bin bags left on the ground, lids off the bin etc
Minimise harbourage opportunities,no junk around the property, trim hedgesregularly with specific attention to areas close to walls.
Proof the property against potential rodent access, a thorough inspection of the perimeter is needed!(Mice need a 6mm gap to enter your home!)
Eliminate water sources! Rats are attracted to water taps,water pipes, drains etc

A frequent sighting of rats or mice may not necessarily mean you have an infestation but simply didn’t take the four prevention steps detailed above. If you are worried there is an infestation you must be as detailed and specific as possible when calling pest control. Include details such as number of rodents exact location and how often you have seen the rodents. Thats it for today guys I hope this blog was useful and please share with others in the industry too, you can follow me at @rentview_ and please check out Owl Pest Control.

July 20, 2012

Meeting with the Property Services Regulatory Authority

Myself (Andreas) and co founder Colin met with the Chief Executive Officer of the PSRA Tom Lynch yesterday. We wanted to discuss the new Property Services Regulation Act and how Rentview can assist agencies run in line with the new laws.

The two main areas of note for a letting and managing agent in the Property Services (Regulation) Act 2011 are Clients accounting and the letter of engagement between landlord and agent. Rentview will allow an agency automate this through the Rentview platform ensuring an agency is complying with the law and keeping within best industry practices.

The Authority is there to regulate the agencies and to ensure the services being offered by the industry is being delivered to the landlord. Without a signed letter of engagement in place between landlord and agent within the first 7 days of engagement of services an agency can not continue to offer a service to the landlord. This is something that the PSRA had in the code of practice which agents previously choose if they signed up to and followed or not. The code of practice will now become the law when an agency is licensed.

So whilst agencies across the country are awaiting for their license it should not be too long now before the Authority starts issuing them. Its a huge task for the Authority and where previously there was a number of Revenue offices that issued the licenses its now done from one. With the new licensing procedure the PSRA office will process nearly 6,000 license requests compared to approx 1800 last year.

Once all the applications have been processed and the agencies have received their licenses the authority will then regulate the industry. For an agency to operate and not comply to the act and all of its laws they will be shut down.

Having worked within the industry I know that this regulation will greatly improve the services being offered by agents to landlords. The Licensing should also remove unprofessional agents and if not now then some time in the very near future.

As always we would love to hear any questions you may have or have your opinions on this blog. Please feel free to Tweet, Share, Like and everything else that makes us social 😉

by Andreas Riha

July 19, 2012

NPSRA Licensing

As most of you are aware by now the NPSRA (National Property Services Regulatory Authority) took over the licensing of property service providers on July sixth 2012. This includes auctioneers/estate agents, letting agents and property management agents. So the NPSRA is now a body who has the ability to legally punish those who provide such services. This blog runs through the nine key steps you need to take to register with the NPSRA if you haven’t already done so! In our next blog on the topic we will detail the requirements outlined in their codes of practice. Until then enjoy and click the ‘like’ to share!

by Andreas Riha

July 17, 2012

Property Infographic: Landlords and Property Management

Rentview are always busy looking to provide some useful information to the rental market and our latest Infographic looks at some of the key trends/issues landlords are facing with their rental properties today. Take a look at our findings.

Now some quick notes on the data and areas for discussion :

Bank transfer is the most common payment method with over half of the landlords surveyed collecting the rent this way. Just under 30% are using a standing order to deduct the amount each month while 14% still physically collect the rent from their tenants. Which is easiest in your opinion?

Our next question we quizzed the landlords on was their experience in collecting the rental payments. Almost half (43%) of landlords have experienced some sort of difficulty in collecting rent. Definitely a worrying statistic which raises the question of quality of referencing tenants?

Following on from my point on the quality of referencing we questioned our landlord database on the various formats they use for issuing a reference to a tenant. Not surprisingly e-mail has taken over from some of the previously popular formats like phone and written.

A big area we wanted to analyse was how the landlord communicates with their tenants for management of the property. This is a big area in which Rentview help agencies save time and reduce the no of hours they have that phone held to their ear! Coming out on top was landlords who call their tenants and those who have hired an agent on their behalf to manage the tenant and the property. I have always been a conscious of using the phone when dealing with important tenant/landlord issues as it is in no way traceable if there was ever to be a disagreement.

And finally the stuff most of us don’t want to hear, how many landlords have had to issue legal notices to their tenants on rents unpaid. Unfortunately one fourth of the landlords have issued a rent arrears or eviction notice.

For more information on Rentview you can click here , and connect with Rentview on Facebook and twitter @Rentview_ .

by Andreas Riha

July 10, 2012

Infographic: The Dublin Rental market

With the rental market in Dublin approaching its busiest time of the year we take a look at the market and what is available.

Once again, a few quick notes on what we can take from this.

There is a huge supply of rental property in Dublin at the moment meaning the market is highly competitive for the agencies while tenants benefit from such a large supply with less demand. Interestingly enough I just checked Daft.ie to compare our figure as we created this early last week and they are identical, so not much movement for now.

Secondly, as expected Apartments are the dominant property type throughout the city, this is was obviously going to be the case in such a highly congested city with most house’s outside for the city having homeowners. Thankfully there is only 227 flats as I have a hatred towards them after my year long stay in Rathmines during college 🙂

Out of the 4756 properties currently on the market the majority (A total of 77.3%) are two and three beds, interestingly the number of 3 bed apartments available is just over three hundred less than two beds.

Lastly we breakdown the amounts of properties available at the various and most comment rental prices, starting with the bargain hunter @ 0-€500 they have a limited selection of 146 rental properties. From there the number of properties gradually rises through the next two rent brackets and peaking during the €800-€1,100 bracket with over two thousand properties on the market in that price range.

As always we would love to hear your feedback on this topic.

Other property infographics –

The NPSRA & Licensed property services providers

Landlords and tenants infographic

by Andreas Riha