letting agency software

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 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 2, 2012

Rent collection within your letting agency

So you want to streamline the rent collection service you are offering within your agency?

Having administration problems collecting rental payments from your tenants? Are tenants dropping by your office and paying cash in rent or worse still, are you dropping by the late properties and collecting rental payments from tenants? Administration and time-consuming nightmare!

Are you aware that as of July 6^th 2012 the Property Services (Regulation) Act 2011 states that your client’s account needs to be totally transparent and audited at the year’s end? Have you the correct paper trail put in place to track everything?

So apart from the headaches in collecting rental payments in cash and lodged by tenants in cash, there is also a significant cost in doing this. This is a great opportunity for you to streamline the rental management side of your business.

There are a number of steps needed to be taken in order to streamline the rent collection service:

1. Client’s Rental account. This is a must and the very first step which needs to be taken. If you do not have a rental client’s account, get in contact with your bank manager and set one up. This is quite an easy process and your bank will be happy to facilitate this.

2. Banking online. If you do not use banking online yet, get it set up immediately and have the ability to access the rental client’s account.

3. Set up a launch date to have your tenants pay into your rental client account. If you have a number of tenants that pay directly into your office or lodge in cash to your rental account who are mid-lease, inform them of the changes being launched. Set a realistic launch date. Say perhaps 6 weeks away. This should give ample time for tenants to set up a standing order from their bank accounts to yours. This may not be to every tenant’s liking, but it’s essential for your business. Not only does it cost you when you or tenants lodge in cash(typically .5% of a lodgement is a charge) but it’s unsafe and an administration nightmare.

4. Issue your tenants with a standing order and ensure they return it to you signed and referenced. The standing order should have a start date (at the latest their second next payment due) and a end date (the end date should be the 11 month of the lease i.e if the lease if up on the 1st of September then the last rental payment should be the 1^st of August). A standing order can run without an end date also. It is essential to have the rental payment referenced. The receivers reference is what needs to be filled out on the standing order so once the payment reaches your account you know what it is for. Rentview issue a lease code for each lease you are managing. The lease code is an 8 digit code mixed of letters and numbers (which will never be duplicated). You may also want to use the first line of address but this may be duplicated in time. Lastly, submit the standing order with the tenant’s bank. This can be done by post or by handing it into a branch.

You can fill out a standing order form for a tenant and get the forms from a branch of a bank or online. Here is an example of a Standing order form from AIB. Remember you need to get the tenant to sign this.

You may also use a white labelled standing order form as seen here.

rent-collection

5. Setting up new properties with a rental management collection. This is very similar to above. Typically the first monthly payment is paid up front with the deposit on signing of the lease. If this is the case, the first payment collected via the standing order would be for the 2^nd rental payment (if the lease was signed on the 1^st of July the 1st payment collected via standing order shall be the 1^st of august)

6. Monitoring the payments. For effective rental management, the client’s account should be checked every day a rental payment is due or if payments are outstanding. Once a payment is made, the rent should be forwarded to your landlord’s rent account. This should be preferably done electronically through online banking (more efficient and it costs less than issuing a cheque). Any deductions and management fees should be withheld. All in-house fees should be transferred weekly to the business account. It is good practice to clear the clients rental account weekly to “0” or just the holding of rental deposits. In most cases, a second client’s deposit account should be set up to hold these.

7. Rental payment receipts. As payments are received electronically, a rent receipt should be issued to the tenant in line with the tenancies act. Through Rentview, as you process payments as ‘received’, your tenant is automatically sent a rent receipt via email.

8. Non-paying tenants. If a tenant fails to pay on time, the tenant should be contacted and after a grace period of say 3 working days, a rent arrears notice should be issued. This is best industry practice and should be enough of a deterrent for the tenant to pay on time in the future. The longer a tenant does not pay and no rent arrears notice is issued, the longer the agency is exposing the landlord to potential losses. The Rentview system will automatically generate the rent arrears notice in line with the Tenancies Act 2004.

9. Landlord’s accounts & end of year statement. A copy of the landlord’s accounts which shows all deductions and invoices should be kept for the landlord at all times. Through Rentview your landlord will be able to access their accounts at any stage, once given access by your agency. If you do not wish to give landlords access, the accounts can be printed off at any stage.

As always we would love to hear your feedback on this topic. Is there a topic you would like discussed?

by Andreas Riha

June 28, 2012

Automatically generating agency invoices

Product Development Update- After listening to agencies through out the country we understand that a huge headache for agents is generating the invoices for fees to landlords. Whilst its great to have the ability to generate an invoice as it represents revenue it can sometimes be a pain to generate the invoice. Not anymore!!

Now through Rentview you can generate an invoice for your agency in seconds, not only will the invoice be branded towards your agency but as always with Rentview’s Transparency it can be viewed on line for your landlords through their secure login via your agencies Sub domain.

Rentview’s application will also pre-set your monthly management invoices for the period of the lease. All agency invoices which are generate are located in your agency account section and with one print off you can have your end of month, quarter or annual vat returns ready.

Now letting agents can focus on what they do best.. Letting properties

Generating Agency Invoices with Rentview.com from Rentview on Vimeo.

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

Please feel free to comment, share , tweet etc.

by Rentview

June 27, 2012

Product Development : Automaton of the Lease Agreement

Just a quick blog post to inform our customers of a great new feature we have added to the property management software on all three Rentview packages lite, premium and enterprise.The lease generator will create a lease once you input the date relating to the rental property and specfic lease. The only field which you may wish to change per lease is the special conditions field. This field has the ability to input up to 1000 characters and will be located on the last page of the lease.

Once the lease is generated you will have the option to share it with your tenants, they will be emailed through Rentview informing them that a lease is now ready to be viewed on their Rentview account. (This of course is only possible once you add a tenants email address) So no longer will you go to sign a lease with a tenant only to find that the tenant wants to read through the document. This wouldn’t be a problem normally for an agent but when you only have put €1 in the parking meter the pressure can mount!

by Rentview

(Source: http://vimeo.com/)

June 26, 2012

Information Systems Planning for Letting Agents Part Two

Continuing on from last weeks post where we discussed the placement that software programs may have in an agencies overall strategy today we begin to look at the five steps of the IS (Information Systems) plan which is adapted from Gabrielle Piccoli book on Information Systems for Managers.

Step One: Know who you are, strategic business planning.

Always ensure there is a long term plan for the overall direction of the agency before developing your IS plan. Software is an enabler of such plans, for example as an agency you may want to grow the business to a stage where you will require more offices/branches. In this case you may pursue a software package that is going to help catch tenants and landlords attention and improve the value you provide to your customer. On the flip side your costs may be badly affecting profits so you may be in pursuit of a system which will significantly reduce administration costs such as printing and accounts management. So you have an idea of why you need the software now its time for step two.

Step two: Know where you start: Information Systems Assessment

Once the agency has a clear grasp on the role of software in the organisation we must assess the current situation your letting agent is in. So there is a few key things we do here, firstly note the different types of software or hardware you use to manage data. Is Microsoft excel your one stop shop for accounts? Is all written communication with landlords done via you E-mail account etc? How are sales calls and service calls recorded and managed? Where are invoices stored and managed and so on? Basically you want to access the role systems even as basic as Microsoft word are working for your agency and especially to access if they’re effective in terms of the business strategy.

Thats the technical side of the assessment but don’t forget the people. Planning for the use of IS or software programs always involves four things people,technology,process and structure, each interlinked for ensuring efficient use of IS or software programs. Question your staff members or in the case of an individual running an agency on the use of such systems and what they may lack or require to help you. For example you may have the latest accounts management system for dealing with all your inbound and outbound payments but if the staff are struggling to use the system then it may not be effective for the business. I have often heard of payments being missed by an agent or landlord due to basic mismanagement of information where the software didn’t ensure payments are received etc, there is numerous other things you may notice at this point. All of this then leads to the main step which is creating the vision for IS in the agency, that will be discussed in the next blog 🙂 Please comment with your thoughts and share if you found this useful or interesting.

Information systems planning for letting agents part one

by Rentview

June 18, 2012

Strategic Alignment for a Letting Agency

Strategic alignment refers to the closeness of the relationship between company CEO’s or senior management and Information systems managers, or those workers heavily involved with the use of technology and software in the work place. Aligning the information system’s purpose and direction with the overall direction of the firm is a vital for long-term success.

The purpose of this blog is to help agencies and other companies alike to understand the process of aligning the needs of the organisation. After a year of learning about the role of information systems in organisations today, one thing was clear to me in my studies; it’s all about the planning.

Opportunities come and go fast, so it is important for all management to sit down and plan the role of information systems in the organisation. There are some key PEOPLE that an organisation needs to look at first; general managers, functional managers and the end-user are all important when making a decision on the use of information systems. For example, if you are debating whether to purchase property management software for your agency, it’s important to discuss the potential use of the software with your functional staff members and the end-user who is your customer, be it landlord or tenant.

To help align the information systems goals with business goals there are a few key questions that a general manager and firm can ask themselves. Gabriel Piccolli, the author of Information systems for Managers, Texts and Cases brings us the five key questions.

1-How much should we spend on IT?

A simple question that forces senior execs to discuss and decide what they are willing to spend on the role of information systems in the organisation, it helps if the agency know their budget before they go to the market looking for a property management solution.

2-Which business process should receive the €€€?

Which business processes are important to the firm that need some IT investment? I would assume activities such as website maintenance and management of customers would place highly here. Again it’s good to establish these things before making your investment.

3-How good do our IT services really need to be?

This question forces senior execs to make a conscious decision about the degree of service the firm needs and what they are willing to pay for. A smaller agency may only require a simple and low complex software system for certain business activities while the multi branch agencies may require a bigger and more comprehensive system.

4-What security and privacy risks will we accept?

Obviously this is something an organisation needs to discuss before investing in an information system and it is a hot topic at the moment with Google who I like to call ‘the ruler of the internet’ catching some negative PR for their new policies on the storage of customer data. For agencies looking to acquire software and align its use with business goals, you must ensure your data will be safe and retrievable when purchasing a system. Most software providers will state weather data can be obtained at the end of use.

5-Who do we blame if it all goes wrong?

Execs must clearly identify and assign responsibility for the information systems in the firm. This is helpful in assessing problems with the use of the software, such as the system not meeting expectations of the general managers. To put this into context, if you were to purchase a Rentview package for your agency you may assign work to your functional and general staff. In this case the general manger or agency owner may be responsible for setting up the different user accounts of each of his functional staff (the property managers), while a functional manager such as a senior letting agent may be given the responsibility of setting up accounts for the agency clients; both landlords and tenants.

That’s it for today, the next post relating to information systems will look at the first stages of the planning process. Please feel free to comment and discuss the post below.

by Rentview

June 7, 2012

Property management- Wear and Tear of a rented property

Property management – wear and tear of a rented property

No property will remain in pristine condition throughout its existence. The mere act of people living in a property means that wear and tear will occur. This is especially true for rented properties, as the volume of people moving in and out can be quite high. It is the main sticking point when it comes to inventories and is the source of many disputes, with tenants claiming normal wear and tear and the landlord holding deposits and claiming damages. For this reason, it is important that both parties are clear on what defines normal wear and tear.

property-management-wearandtear

More often than not, it is a grey area. A hole in a plaster wall, a broken window and wardrobe doors torn off their hinges are fairly obviously damages but what about cracked bathroom tiles or a worn place in the carpet? Are they wear and tear? The legal definition of ‘normal wear and tear occurs where deterioration of the subject matter takes place over a period of time due to ordinary and reasonable use of the premises’ would suggest they quite probably are, but it’s still not entirely clear-cut. Keeping records of when items were bought or installed can help reduce the ambiguity. For example, a good quality carpet laid down a year ago would be expected to show less wear and tear after a one year tenancy than one laid down five years ago.

property-management-carpet

The best ways to avoid wear and tear disputes are to ensure both parties agree to a definition and a detailed inventory is taken at the start of the tenancy. Photographs in particular can be a great aid in settling such disputes.

Why not read our blog on ‘Dispute over the condition of the Property’

As always please feel free to comment, share, tweet or follow us

Thanks for reading!

by Andreas Riha

Letting agency software

June 6, 2012

Silver for property management app- Rentview

TWO YOUNG entrepreneurs, Andreas Riha and Colin Napper, founders of Rentview.com, have been presented with the silver prize in the start-up awards category of On Line/Digital start-up of the year. The Vodafone Ireland sponsored awards ceremony was held in Dublin’s Burlington Hotel.

Andreas and Colin come from a property management background having developed an application that addresses the needs of letting agents.

Rentview’s transparent cloud-based application ensures that letting agents can manage their rental portfolio with ease.

It also allows easy access by landlords and their tenants.

The facility aims to improve efficiencies, reduce administration time and boost revenue.

It is currently being used by 40 agencies.

View this article (The Irish Times Wed 6th June 2012)