landlords

May 14, 2013

Link building strategies

Link Building strategies for your letting agency

Link building for your letting agency website is crucial in order for your site to get listed high on organic search results. In a previous post we discussed the biggest challenge letting agents face today, which was winning new properties to let and manage. We then went on to discuss how to win more landlords with a post on marketing to landlords in 5 Steps.

With so many letting agency websites to compete with it has become essential for you to put an SEO strategy into place.

Link Building strategies

One way search engines rank your website higher against others is by how many times your website gets mentioned on the internet. This term is simply called “inbound links”. The more websites that mention your website the higher search engines rank your own website (Page Rank). Page rank is important as the higher a websites page ranks the higher amount of credibility it gives to its link to you (Link Juice). If you are going to start to build links you need to research link building strategies.

What tools can help you?

A tool you can easily use in your toolbar to see what page rank a website has is available on Google Chrome

A really quick way to find out how many links you currently have going to your site can be found by visiting Alexa. Enter your site url and it will return a link with your number of links.

A useful exercise is to check up with a number of your competitors and see how they are doing. Through some research you could possibly find some websites that can give you some really strong links.

Further research into link building

Probably one of the best articles I have ever come across with regards to Link building strategies is written by Jon Cooper. If there is ever a document I would recommend reading it is this one… by the way it is free and I did not write it 😉

We would be delighted to hear how you get on with your link building strategies and what worked well for you.

by Andreas Riha

Imagecredits Mark Kens

March 11, 2013

Management of communication

Good communication between your Letting Agency, your Landlords and Tenants is a vital tool in keeping your customers happy and retaining them going forward. The office phone will usually start ringing from 9am until 5pm with numerous queries or information from tenants and landlords; where is this month’s rent? Can I have a breakdown of my accounts? There is a problem with my washing machine! The radiator in the main bedroom doesn’t work!

If you manage rental properties you will surely have heard some of these topics or issues arise from landlords and tenants. The problem today is there are too many ways of communicating issues or problems into your office and the information can get lost if you don’t set down some rules or guidelines.

I list below some of the main communication channels used by landlords and tenants when contacting you or your office.

Management of Communication

via Telephone

The trusty telephone is still the number one way landlords and tenants will communicate with letting agents and property managers. If you use this as your main point of contact for your customers, expect to get a deluge of messages come Monday morning on rent and property management issues. Depending on the size of your rental management portfolio you may need to hire a receptionist to take care of the queries coming in.

via Email

This is a very popular and a preferred way for some agencies to communicate with customers, especially with landlords who may be in a different time zone. With access to Smartphones, it is easier than ever to communicate with tenants and landlords and you can sync your work email up to your Smartphone easily. The downside is, you may never be off work with emails popping up frequently, and the communications never stop. The main danger here is that if you get an email in the night time, come the start of the next working day, you may have forgotten to act upon it.

via Text

Text message is another way of communication management used and sometimes preferred by your customers. It is usually used in non-urgent situations by tenants looking to rent a property or to alert property managers to issues within the property. Tenants along with potential tenants who have poor oral English will send a text as they tend to be better at writing than speaking over the phone.

via Office

You will still get some landlords and tenants who will call into your office to speak to you as they prefer a more personal approach to all of this (old/new) technology stuff. The good reason for having a nice office is to be able to welcome your landlords and tenants in for a chat. If unavailable, the best approach here would be to log the issues in a diary or leave a message with the designated property manager who will deal with the query if you are not there.

via Social media

Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter could be used to communicate with your customers but should probably only be used to promote your brand or notify of an emergency or announcement. This is open for debate and some Letting Agencies may prefer to communicate with people via social media as they can be seen to be proactive at dealing with things.

via distributed messages from different communication channels

Imagine a property manager using his diary to write down a call from a landlord, communicating with a tenant via text or emailing a landlord their invoices. If your agency uses all of the above to communicate with landlords on rent and property management issues it is vital you use a good tool for the management of communication. A good CRM or online diary with a task manager is a vital tool in your armoury because your information could get lost if it is not noted down or logged.

What form of management of communication do you use in your letting agency? We would love to hear and share with other letting agents and property managers what works best for them. Let us know!

by Colin Napper

March 7, 2013

Finding landlords – Expand your letting agency portfolio in 5 steps

Finding landlords

Finding new landlords is the biggest challenge for letting agents and property managers. For most letting agencies and rental managers, finding tenants in today’s rental market is easier than finding landlords. So how can you increase your marketability as a letting agency to new landlords? Well there are a number of housekeeping procedures that some letting agents fall behind on which we will discuss below. These can improve marketability to new landlords and help in finding landlords to expand an agency’s portfolio.

finding-landlords

1. Advertised properties on portals

A lot of landlords today look through property portals to try and estimate what their property will achieve on the market prior to it being available. They will look at properties in the area, pictures, descriptions etc. So it is very important that your listed properties are looking their best. Have a detailed property description, mind your typos, make sure your pictures are professional and not taken from a low mega pixel digital camera. I would also strongly advise against night time photos. Even if the market is busy and you know that if it was listed without pictures you would still get a dozen showings in 48 hours ensure every listing is as professional as possible.

2. Profile Page about your letting agency

Once again landlords are busy looking through portals and having a profile with 2 lines of text is just lazy. I am not saying list a page full of text but put some thought into what your services are and what makes your rental agency stand out against the busy crowd. If there is possible to upload thumbnails of the staff, do it. This is a service business and that means it’s a people business so let landlords know who you are.

3. About us

This is similar to the above and is also relevant to your website. There are a lot of property websites that I visit and I can’t find out any information on the staff in the agency. Have they experience? Who are they? Have they been working in the industry long? This is all information that potential landlords really love to know. So why not really sell yourself here?

4. Services

We provide a full letting and property management service. This sometimes is as much information that is on a letting agencies profile or website and it’s not going to get you a large volume of inbound inquiries. List your services and if there is something that makes you stand out list it. Do you provide Digital Inventories on all your let properties? Do you offer a landlord free online account login on all managed properties? Free energy certs on all rentals? If there is something you can offer or currently offer that makes you stand out let potential landlords know about it.

5. Testimonials

In the information age that we live in there is nothing more appealing than customer testimonials in finding landlords. Now a written testimonial by Jack Smith is good but landlords may think is it genuine? A picture of Jack Smith beside his testimonial is more powerful. You can take this to the next level and include a small video clip of Jack Smith giving a testimonial. One of my favourite types of testimonials I am seeing now is Jack Smith leaving a testimonial on a Facebook page. Extract this and post it on your website and link it to your Facebook page. This way your new landlords can see its genuine and also might Like your Facebook page.

finding-landlords-letting-agent

Following this list can only increase your brand and image as a excellent and trustworthy letting agent or property manager. I would love for you to tell me what number 6, 7 or even 8 could be on this list so why not comment and let me know? Finding landlords is not easy but I hope this list will allow you find more.

As always, please feel free to share and ask any questions you may have.

Letting agents software

by Andreas Riha

February 7, 2013

Letting agency website design

In our last blog post on letting industry challenges we looked at how winning new landlords was one of the current biggest challenges for letting agents. Apart from providing an excellent service to your landlords and winning referrals, your website is currently your next best marketing tool. The problem is, as we discussed, that many letting agents neglect their website and their letting agency website design.

How to use your strong letting agency website design to build a portfolio

Image Credit: Jayel Aharem

Letting agency SEO

So let’s start by doing a quick health check on your website to see how people are currently finding you. There are a couple of simple enough ways to get under the hood of your site, I would recommend using Google Analytics (click here for a previous blog on Analytics) or Google webmaster tools. You can access these by simply setting up a free Google account (if you haven’t already got one) and simply searching for them. You will need access to the control panel of your website to install a simple code into your website as a security feature. It’s quite simple but if that is something you are not comfortable doing, just ask who ever looks after your site to install the code.

Analyse your website

If you can’t access either of these a simple way to get some information on your website is to got through Alexa. Here you can get a quick overview of where your website ranks. It also gives you the chance to see keyword queries that bring a high percentage of traffic to a particular URL. So when here, check your own site and then perhaps a competitor who is doing well.

Once you get the site up, you can go through and click onto search analytics to see the top search queries which are driving traffic to your competitor’s website. Compare it with your own. Is your competitor generating more traffic through search terms? Are the search terms they rank highly in ones which you wish to gain traffic through? If so, they are probably working more effectively on SEO than your own site. Most letting agents are looking at finding landlords through their website SEO.

How to use your website as a visitor

Search the term that you think a new landlord would search to find a property manager or letting agent in your area, then see who ranks the highest. Now visit their site on Alexa to find out more about them. Learn from their website and implement changes needed to move your website up the search ranking.

Another interesting statistic to find out is how many back links your competitor has. The more back links a site has, the more attractive the website is for search engines to return that site on the first page of a search result (or SERP). A back link is your website’s URL on another website. Below is how a back link looks:

https://rentview.co/blog/data-backup-for-agencies/ or if hyperlinked in text, the same link might look like this.

If you want to know more about link building strategies this is a great place to start. In order for your website to generate traffic, it is very important to look at your letting agency website design.

by Andreas Riha

September 25, 2012

Starting a Letting agency: Letting Agents and Under-used Marketing Tools

Starting a Letting Agency – marketing tools

After the success of last month’s blog on internet marketing tips for estate and letting agents I thought it would be a great idea to try a little something different this week. A more subtle and extremely under-used form of marketing is the utilisation of your customers for word of mouth promotion, in this case it’s the tenants and landlords. Word of mouth marketing has been defined as ‘a face to face conversation between consumers about a product or service experience’. From my research into the area it can also be defined from the agency’s point of view as the ‘Intentional influencing of consumer to consumer communications by professional marketing techniques.‘ Okay, so we know exactly what the term means know from two perspectives, let’s discuss three ways in which to implement some word of mouth marketing techniques.

#1 Utilise what you have first

Stop worrying about all the different ways to market your services to new landlords and tenants. Obviously the more traditional mediums are still of use but it is the dawn of a new era, so agencies need to start thinking outside of the box. In fact, launching new campaigns, which I will mention below, can have a double effect as you start to build relationships with your current clientele while developing the potential to spread your agency via positive peer to peer communication. Check out the video below from a previous blog on Rentview, where I touch on word of mouth potential with tenants at the end.

#2 Stop shouting, start listening

I often see large banner ads placed along major property websites with prices listed for management fees to landlords. Nothing wrong with this obviously, for an integrated marketing communications plan you need to have 360 degree branding (hitting the target market with your message at as many points of contact as possible). However, what is the most trusted influence on a landlord in my opinion? I would say their fellow property owners and what they have to say about a service they have experienced.

#3 Rewards and relationships

Your tenants are handing over a lot of money – hundreds and often thousands per month for the lovely property you have given them. Obviously that’s the deal in place, but in the long run you want them to continue their stay for many years to come. That means, in my opinion, that you need to stay in touch and build and maintain that relationship with your database. What about creating a monthly newsletter with some property tips from your agency team? What about a monthly competition where you invest 300e of current marketing spend into a nice gift like a smart phone to raffle via your social media pages? These are just a couple of quick ideas on how to relationship build for the future.

That’s my top three tips, I hope they were of some help to any agents reading and please give us your feedback and thoughts by heading over to the Facebook or the Twitter pages. I leave you with some happy customers!

by Rentview

September 24, 2012

Product Update: New Landlord Accounts Page Coming Soon

So today in the office we are testing some new developments with the software set to roll out in the near future. I am going to briefly explain the first set of work which has been done and show you some sneak previews of what agency accounts are set to look like soon. If you look at the image below you can see a new button known as “landlord accounts” has been added to the system. This feature update was developed due to new legislation laid out by the N.P.S.R.A (National Property Services Regulatory Authority) requiring increased regulation of monies collected and paid out to landlord clients.

The new feature will allow agents to eliminate any errors made when taking in rental payments, adding the necessary deductions and forwarding payments to their landlords. Once a rent has been marked as paid, the landlord’s accounts page will automatically be updated to remind you of the money to then be paid/transferred to their account. For example look at the rent due below of €1400 on a property, normally this will be marked as paid and then I need to remember to forward on moneys owed to the landlord.

With the new feature (see the image below) the system automatically updates the landlord’s accounts page reminding you of the outgoing payment that is due to your landlord and ensuring the entire process is managed efficiently with NO mistakes.

Hope you look forward to the roll out of these new accounting features as we do and as always if you haven’t liked the Facebook page, do it now 🙂 and follow us on Twitter for more blogs and other great content. Thanks guys!

by Rentview

Landlord Management 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 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