letting agent marketing

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

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

December 15, 2011

Here is a short overview on how a letting agency can set up a Google ad campaign directing visitors to your website. The visitors we aim for here in the video are Landlords who are looking for letting or property management agents in the area the rented property is based.

Through Google ad words you can set up a direct marketing campaign with a limited budget. You can set an ad campaign up from as little as €2 per day. Each adword costs different, so for example an adword/term such as “Property manager Dublin” may cost as much as €2.50 to appear on the top listings of the search term. You can set a maximum spend on an adword/term where it will limit the cost per each one or all of your words/terms. If another company have a higher budget they will appear above your own ad. The lower your bid the lower your ad will appear, the ads will also appear on the right hand side of the search term.

You only pay for a click through, so for instance if your keyword / term appears 50 times in a day but only gets 1 visitor through to your site well then you only pay for 1 visitor. You can track all your keyword / term search results in your adword dashboard.

You can also set the landing page of the visitor to your site. So for example if you are aiming your ad at attracting new landlords to your site well then its best to land them on your services page. You can copy and paste the url from the page you would like your landlords to land on from the url bar and insert it in your ad when setting this up.

Its always best to track your costs and results of marketing and with Google adwords you can do that exactly. Think clever and spend clever 😉

I hope this video helps, but if you have any questions please feel free to connect with me.

Email; andreas@rentview.com

Twitter feed; @Andreas_Riha

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