Email marketing landlords

Email Marketing landlords

Finding it hard to find new landlords? Well you will be glad to know that you are not the only agent out there, it’s the BIGGEST challenge facing letting agents in the rental and letting industry today. If we look at the rental stats today you will see rents are rising…. Why? Simple its supply and demand.

Finding Landlords

Tenants are staying in properties longer and as a result marketing to landlords has become harder. Where can you find landlords? Where can you market to landlords? How can you find new landlords?

These are typically the questions on the edge of each letting agents tongues right now.

Repeat Business

The answer to your problems is most likely with your current database of landlords and their circles. A great way of building your portfolio is by reaching out to previous customers with a promotion and reason to do business with your agency. This can be done through email marketing landlords.

Reason’s to do business

Reasons to do business… also known as a closing tool. This is what will make your landlords & vendors commit to doing business with you. We can either add value or decrease fees. In my opinion adding value is better for your agency as your retaining high revenue and giving additional service. While reducing your fees is a great way to get business on you may end up doing twice the amount of work to get the same profit.

Examples of a closing tool for a letting agent

Increased Value – A very popular closing tool which will increase revenue in the long term is offering free property management with every letting to include rent collection*. Limit this to 4 months for example and place in your terms of engagement that this must be cancelled with 30 days notice. As you are already collecting the rent collecting your fee is simple… You get paid when the landlord does. Having a property management software which allows landlord transparency is a real great way to increase value also.

Reducing Fee’s – As discussed above you may end up doing twice the amount of work for the same revenue but some landlords are very price sensitive and without a monetary reason they will not consider you as a solution in letting, managing or selling their property. The key here is to offer such a good service that repeats business is guaranteed. An example of this would be daily deal sites where the product or service being sold is not achieving a profit but the repeat business at list price will make up for it.

How to market to repeat landlords

Email marketing landlords is a really great way to build business. I would highly recommend looking into Mailchimp as an easy solution to email marketing.

Use mailchimp when email marketing to landlords

Email Marketing landlords through Mailchimp

You can create an email marketing template through Mailchimp and upload your previous email lists easily*.

Reasons for sending email

When sending email marketing landlords its always good to have a reason for sending them an email. For example if its Christmas you could send Christmas Greetings with a gift of “Reduced Fees”or “free property management”. We use the Christmas greeting as the reason to email and the hook for your business is the closing tool.

Subject line’s

If your subject line is not appealing you wont even have your previous landlord or vendors open the email. Think of the marketing emails you receive and which ones you open… OK so I have you thinking, what subject line do you think will make your landlords and vendors open your marketing email?

Take a look at this blog from Mailchimp on What are the best subject lines

email marketing subject lines — Subject lines define what emails get open

Call to Action

Your “Call to Action” is what you want your landlords & vendors to click on. Make sure this stands out within the email as this is the whole reason you are sending this as you want to gather details of who is interested in your services. Take a look at some examples of call to actions on this blog.

Designing your email template

You can send a plain text email when email marketing landlords or a fancy email with built in images. The fancy design will most likely have you engaging the services of a designer but will work a lot better in converting client’s especially if your mail is a Christmas greeting.

landlrord email makreting template — Example of a landlord email marketing template

Conversion Ratio on email marketing landlords

Well that’s what its all about, call it your ROI (return on investment), number of clicks, enquiries etc. Typically speaking you can expect to get 1 in 4 opening your email and anywhere between 0.5% – 1.5% following through with a call to action; ie enquiring further details.

What does that mean in Revenue

Well if you are marketing to 300 landlords and your average fee is £750, you can expect 75 landlords to open your email and to get 3 new listings from this which would mean £2250 in new business.

Start email marketing landlords

Its quite simple, set up a Mailchimp account for free, import your contacts, create a template, fill in the text and send it.. Or seek the assistance of the professional team here at Rentview , info@rentview.com who can do it for you 😉

June 6, 2013

New feature roll outs

As always, the development team are busy at Rentview pushing out new feature roll outs and improvements on our property management software. As always, our users have a big part to play in our feature updates as it is our customers that request them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwgwOb6yT6o?rel=0

Feature Updates

1) Deposit Receipts – are now generated and downloadable from the schedule and they can now also be downloaded when tenants login to access their account.

2) Agency Base Rate – will automatically be used to calculate the management fee when you are adding a new property or starting a new lease. This defaults to a % but can be changed to a figure. Each new property can have a different rate than the base rate.

3) Editing the Rent – if you need to change the rent amount during a lease you can do this now, select ‘Lease’, amend the rent amount, and all future rents will be updated on the remaining unpaid rents.

4) Editing the Management Fee –this change will also apply if you need to change the landlord’s management fee, Select ‘Lease’, amend the rent amount, and all future management fees will be updated on the statement.

5) Tenants’ details – we have also tidied up the tenant’s view page to our new bootstrap style and we will be rolling out a delete option next week here.

6) Total Properties – when checking out your property portfolio we now allow you to see how many properties you have under Management, Let-only or inactive. We also now display how much you charge for your management fee on each property and we will be developing better reports so you can forecast recurring fees.

7) Lease Terms – lastly in this update, when you are starting a lease, the end date will automatically calculate if you select the start date and term.

If there is something you would like to see on the platform, please let us know!

by Rentview

May 7, 2013

Rentview Features

The Rentview team have been busy listening to what our letting agency customers wanted and have made changes and additions to our software.

Rentview.com letting agency software new feature roll outs (by Rentviewsoftware)

As always let us know what you think…

(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)

April 15, 2013

Property profile page new design

This weekend saw the new design of the property profile page being released. We have been busy listening to our users who have asked for an even quicker way in reconciling rental payments as received and paid to landlords.

property profile page

Now agents can do all of these tasks on the Property Profile Page. However if a rental payment due needs to be edited or history viewed this can still all be done through the Schedule page.

Managing financials

Once your rental payment is received you can process it from your Rentview account to the landlords here also. It will now show the deductions to be taken and held from the rent. You can also click through to the invoice page to add/edit or delete any payments from this invoice. As with the rental schedule page you can also click through to the Statement page to view history etc.

Property Notes

Lastly you can also now add notes to the property which are date stamped with which ever agent left the notes. These notes are for internal use only.

To find out more about how Rentview’s letting agency software can help your letting agency enquire at info@rentview.com

by Rentview

April 5, 2013

Creating your YouTube channel

In our previous blog, Why use YouTube for marketing, we discussed the benefits of using rental marketing videos for your letting agency.

Creating your YouTube channel

So the first step in rental marketing videos is setting up a channel to host the videos. There are a number of video hosting platforms but we have used the most popular, YouTube. In this demonstration, I am going to go through creating your YouTube channel.

When creating your YouTube channel it is very important to keep SEO in mind, as this is really going to help the channel to get traffic. If you didnt know already, YouTube is owned by Google, so by using SEO with your brand’s keywords and marketing message in your YouTube profile, you are feeding Google’s search appetite.

Below is a video blog showing how to do this and here is a link to the YouTube channel I just created: Letting Agent UK

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsZckmGYfU8

Creating your Letting agency video channel (by Rentviewsoftware)

by Andreas Riha

March 22, 2013

Why use YouTube for marketing your letting agency

Why use YouTube for Marketing

Answer – If YouTube were a country, we’d be the third largest in the world after China and India,” YouTube said in a blogpost announcing that it now has a billion unique visitors every month. “Nearly 1 out of every 2 people on the internet visits YouTube.

3 Benefits of using property video marketing

Qualified tenants – As discussed in our previous blog on Strategy in marketing a rental property using video marketing will result in a higher qualification of viewing tenants. This means that the tenants that view your property tour and request a viewing actually like the property, location, price, interior and layout. This in turn will reduce showing unqualified tenants and wasting your time.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)– A great way for your letting agency to rank higher in search terms and to return possible results in video on a search. Currently, I am sure you are competing strongly for the term “letting agent in YOUR AREA” on a search engine. Why not type this into YouTube to see what your competition in your area is. For the more advanced on SEO you can use title tags, meta description and keywords to allow your potential customers find you easily.

It promotes your letting agency

All letting agencies list on a wide variety of property portals and ‘To Let’ boards but the majority do not provide video marketing of properties. By offering this, it adds another string to your property marketing bow.

Don’t worry, it’s probably not going to cost you anything and you do not have to be a professional cameraman to make property video tours.

This is a really nice video outlining Video Marketing and how it is becoming the most powerful sales and marketing tool for small and large businesses.

In the next blog I will show how to make and publish a property video tour. If you use Property Video Marketing what results have you seen for your agency? We would love to hear.

So the next time you are asked the question “Why use YouTube for marketing” you know the answer.

You may now be interested to watch Creating your youtube channel

by Andreas Riha

March 20, 2013

How to market rental property

What is your strategy in “How To Market rental property”?

Learning how to market rental property successfully is vital for letting agents and landlords. This skill is even more important than ever before, as the highest amount of tenants ever are looking for private rental property, and the internet is the most common place for them to look.

What strategy do you use to market rental property?

Most letting agents use a strategy to market rental property. I have outlined 3 strategies below that agents use to market to tenants. Each strategy attracts a lead quality.

Property listed with no photos or only an external photo

From my experience, this strategy is often used to market rental property that is not in great condition or below the listed value. Personally, I would feel that by doing this you could be wasting a lot of time in showing the property as people coming to view the property may not be interested in the property at all, but came to view of it because of its location. I think the main strategy behind this is playing “the number game” by getting enough tenants in to view it will eventually interest somebody. The benefit here is the potential to attract a large volume of tenants, depending on price. The negative here is that time is money and you can end up doing multiple showings to a lot of tenants.

Tenant Qualification – The tenant is happy with the location and price.

Property listed with ample photos

This strategy is favoured by most agents who list the property with photos of every or nearly every room. The potential tenants who come to view are qualified* and whilst the volume of tenants may not be as high, they are interested in seeing more than just the interior photos. This is when you market rental property as it saves you a significant amount of time.

Tenant Qualification* –The tenant is happy with the location, price, property and interior.

Property listed with a walk through video

This is a very targeted strategy. It brings SEO benefits to your letting agency brand if done correctly. This may take longer for you as a letting agent to advertise, but it really is a great way to list and market rental property. Any potential tenant who has viewed the marketing video and arranged a viewing are as qualified as they come.

Tenant Qualification –The tenant is happy with the location, price, property, interior and layout.

It does not require you to have professional recording equipment and in fact most smart phones now with a 5 mega pixel + camera providing excellent footage. They can be quickly uploaded directly from your smart phone to a YouTube or Vimeo account through their app. In our next blog we will look at creating your youtube channel.

You may also be interested in reading Why use youtube for marketing?

In a previous blog on Marketing to landlords in 5 steps I discussed how important it is to always market a property as professionally as possible. One of the reasons being is that it is a great way to market to landlords looking for an agent who has property in the same area as their own rental unit.

Here are a couple of links of different marketing strategies used by a estate and a letting agent:

Using humour in your marketing to attract viewers “Up tight Tribute to Honest Agent”

I am not sure if this letting agency was having a bad day when they decided to market this rental property or if the letting agent is a PR genius. I am sure that if they are reading they will go with the latter after all they got mentioned in national press, social media and even on our blog ha ha!

how-to-market-a-rental-property-example

I would love to hear your feedback on the strategy you find best and or perhaps a strategy that I have not mentioned.

by Andreas Riha

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 5, 2013

How to collect rent

Collect rent

One of the fundamental tasks a letting agent or property manager will undertake when managing a rental portfolio is to effectively manage the rent collection. There is a whole ecosystem working here and if you have a good Rental Management Software system in place, it saves you a lot of time and effort. It also helps if you have managed to secure good quality referenced tenants for your properties, then you can reduce the possibility of the extra work load.

The reality for some letting agencies is that managing the rental payments from tenants is quite a stressful (Full time) job. If all goes to plan and tenants pay on time via standing order or direct debit then the rent paying eco system flows perfectly. Tenant paying on time means the letting agency receives fees on time and the Landlord / Mortgage is paid on time. Usually what happens here is your landlord has a very good experience dealing with your letting agency and you retain the landlord as a customer.

collect-rent

When managing rental properties it is important letting agents and property manager’s setup efficient ways to collect the monthly or weekly rent. Agents who use Property Management Software can reduce admin time. Below I have listed some of the most popular methods.

How to collect rent

Standing order: The most cost effective way to manage rental payments is by setting up a standing order with your tenants for the rental payments. Make sure if you are managing multiple rental payments you include a reference code to identify the rent payment.

collect-rent-software

Direct debit: This is a great way to collect rent payments and gives letting agencies great control when administrating rental payments. Similar to a standing order but with better controls, please beware of any cost implications for your letting agency if tenants funds bounce. I recently came across a company who facilitate the collection of funds via direct debit called www.gocardless.com who charge up to £2 per transaction.

Collecting cash: The oldest method used to collect rent. When managing rental payments, this is the one method I would not recommend you implement if you are managing a mid-size portfolio. There are too many issues with collecting rent via cash from tenants each month. I hear from too many letting agencies who allow their office to be used as a bank for tenants to lodge cash. It is better to use another method to collect rent. Some of the issues which could arise include:

Losing or misplacing cash in office.
Leaving your office open to robbery.
Fraud issues with staff members administrating cash transactions.
Cost of bank charges for cash lodgements can be expensive.
Administration time managing cash lodgements.

Bank lodgement: Allowing your tenants lodge funds directly to your bank is another method used by some property managers for their rent management. Agents need to be aware of the bank charges levied for allowing tenants to lodge to your bank account when using this method to collect rent. You will also need to be aware of lodged rental payments which are not referenced and from previous experience managing a rental portfolio, I can tell you that this can be an administration nightmare.

Credit card: With increased access to debit and credit cards this could be a way to collect rent in the future but the costs are just too high at the moment and to get a merchant ID from a provider is sometimes difficult. Would you pay 2.9% or (£14.50) to collect rent of £500 from your tenants?

You may also be interested in this infographic on The Costs of taking Monthly Rental Payments .

Let us know what your experiences are in rent management, or if you have any questions, do get in touch!

by Colin Napper

February 12, 2013

Letting agency business model changing in Ireland

With fewer properties on the rental market and more Estate Agents offering a letting service, letting agents will need to diversify to retain previous years’ revenues.

Letting agency business model changing

According to the the latest DAFT report issued on the 11th of February, the availability of Rental property in the capital is at a 6 year low and 4 years nationally. In fact there is only a 1/4 of the amount of properties listed today that were listed back in 2009 in the capital.

letting-agency-business-model-changing

With the average tenancy in place at 19 months the tenancy churn is not there for agents to make fees more regularly. That is unless an agent gets a property to full management where they can take a fee every month. The Rentview team speak with letting agents on a daily basis. These agents are looking at property and rent management as a way of increasing revenue and being able to forecast revenue month on month. Something that they are not able to do in a let-only model.

Currently there are just over 2000 properties marketed in Dublin and a pool of approx 200 agencies. That’s an average of only 10 units per agency. This does not take into effect the number of ghost units being advertised also (units which are let agreed or marketed with a number of agents) … and they say the Taxi industry is overcrowded!

recession-business-model-changing

So what else are letting agents doing to increase revenue? Well they are being creative and flexible as to what their landlords require. Some are offering complete inventories, midterm inspections, lease renewals. In fact, we even came across a few agents who are offering marketing services, to save the landlord the work of marketing properties on online portals. So as we can see, many are offering bespoke services to suit a landlord rather than just a let-only or a let and manage service.

How is your letting agency standing out from the crowd and keeping solid revenue coming in? Is your letting agency business model changing? You may also be interested on our blog posting finding landlords.

by Andreas Riha

Letting Agents Software