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 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

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 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)

March 13, 2012

Rental property – Fake landlord scam

Following on from the cheque cashing scam its important to remember that not only the agent / landlord who is the potential target in property rental scams. Through out my career within the lettings industry I have spoken to numerous tenants who have experienced such a scam. The fake landlord scam is where tenants hand over a deposit and possible rent upfront to a fake landlord. This scam normally happens as follows.

A home hunter responds to an ad normally on a free advertising website but could also be on a property portal, local paper etc. The home hunter arrives to view the property which is priced below the norm in a well sought after area. The tenant very much interested and in assuming they are getting a bargain is convinced to hand over a deposit. So what is wrong here you ask? Well this landlord is doing this to every set of tenant who has called to view the place. The landlord could do this for the whole day in 30 minute intervals or even a couple of days. The first time anyone is made suspicious is when the phone number the tenant contacted the landlord on is no longer reachable. Here is the story of a particular case in Dublin of such incidence.

In some cases the brazen fake landlord will also arrange to meet, sign a lease, hand over keys and collect the rent in advance perhaps in a hotel lobby or coffee shop. When the home hunter arrives with lease and key in hand at the dream property the key does not work. There might even be a queue of new tenants looking to see if their key works. Here is such a case where once again the con man was caught.

So as you can see just because someone has possession of a property it does not mean they are the owner or acting on the owners behalf. It is ever so important to know who you are handing the deposit over to. Bank draft & cheques are always the best way to give a deposit as they are traceable. Under some genuine circumstances a property may require something to hold it for a night. Perhaps until you can get a draft and if you are placing a cash deposit it should be only a token amount to show you are serious. I would say nothing more than €50, this should be ok for one evening. Most if not all professional agents and landlords will be fine with this and if they are not it might be better to walk away.

The above incidents happen to a very, very, very small percentage of rental properties. But it can happen and it is always better to be safe then sorry.

Other blogs which may interest you are The Rental Property Scam & Property Rental scam cheque cashing

by Andreas Riha

March 9, 2012

IT Solutions in the Lettings Industry

Some of the best nuggets of information I can share with you this week comes from an interesting talk I attended from Derek McCullagh the head of operations and technology in AIB and Karl Howley the chairman of itsmf.ie on Monday 5^th of March in DIT. The topic discussed was the importance of adapting IT solutions for organisations in Ireland today. For those who haven’t heard of irSMF.ie, like me before Monday morning I’ve taken this quote from there company site which describes what they do best:

‘to be the premier community for leadership in IT service Management In Ireland ’

Now this applies to most companies in different industries but I will refer to the lettings and management side of things for the purpose of the blog. So let’s start with the roles service management plays in helping business’s do things:

Faster

More Reliable

More Efficient

More Cost effectively

This is the one slide from their presentation on IT services management that stuck with me most and I will explain its importance under each heading below or lettings agent and estate agent owners below.

1. From an agencies perspective imagine you can receive a rent and click one button to do the following

inform the landlord rent is received
inform the tenant rent is received and send them a receipt
update their schedule of online accounts

You’re cutting out a lot of work for yourself by having a system which can perform such tasks and ensure you only have to do the basics of property management while the IT system performs the rest for you.

Efficiency in Organisations

2. Letting a property and managing one involves a lot of paper work and reliance on sufficient management of documents and tenant/landlord information. If you’re faced with an issue from a tenant or a landlord in the office and you can’t draw on the information of them straight away it relfects poorly on you and your organisation.

Imagine turning that 5 or 10 minutes spent looking for their file whether its references or lease terms into five clicks on your desktop where you have all the information necessary to deal with the problem at hand!

3 and 4 Are closely linked and some of the more appealing points to organisational managers, how can you carry out the core processes of your business more efficiently and for a lower cost. By adapting a service solution into the lettings and management of properties its hard not to save money and be more efficient.

Using the simple example in lettings of taking a property in from a landlord for letting I will explain the benefits of using IT systems. Lets say the property is new on the market and proving very popular what is the process of letting the property:

You take 5-10 calls in the first day you ad is live on daft and be jotting down the tenant information and appointment times as you take the calls
You then may refer back to the landlord on potential viewings or tenants
Once you show the property your faced with the dilemma of who to pick and acquiring all the necessary documents such as work and landlord references

Think of logging this information online into a management system for letting agents and then sharing access with your property owner so as they know you’re working your hardest to secure someone for the property. Once you meet the clients you can tell them upload any relevant information onto your data system and now the landlord can see themselves the potential tenants you have. You can communicate through your system at speed and no cost such as phone charges and the process is a whole lot easier now!

Letting market all set to perform well over the coming years for properties in cities across Ireland

Only last week the Irish independent ran its front page with the Headline:

Young couples told ‘rent, don’t buy’ as prices keep falling

Thousands of potential first-time house buyers were last night told to rent rather than buy as prices are forecast to continue falling for the next two years. Read more – Irish Independent

And today the latest press reports suggest that residential rental values could rise as much as 14% by 2013.

Rents predicted to rise as more hold off buying

Figures from real estate firm Savills show that after dropping by 25% from 2008 peak levels, rents are now on the rise again. Read more – Irish Examiner

To Let signs

Whilst the latest Daft report shows nearly a 30% reduction in stock in vacant properties available since 2008- Daft report

Daft.ie stock report

All this points to a very strong rental market in Ireland for the future.

With a lack of credit and no confidence in the property market demand is high for a shrinking amount of rental stock.

November 14, 2011

Increasing your property portfolio through the web

Having met with lots of different agencies over the last couple of months it appears that most, if not all agencies, are looking to expand and build their property portfolio for lettings and management.

So how can your agency increase its property portfolio?

Attract more landlords to your agency

If you want to increase your property portfolio, you’ll need to attract landlords first. The easiest way to do this is to attract them to your website. Your website should be the main port of call and act as a hub for activity. You need to have contact information clearly available on your website. Potential clients should be able to see 2 things from a quick glance at your website:

what services you offer
how to contact you

If you think about it, your website is like your international shop window. It could therefore gain you a lot of business. Equally, by not investing time effort (and some money) in a website, you are losing out on potential custom. After all, in today’s economic climate, landlords are increasingly based all around the world and these accidental landlords who may have initially rented the property prior to emigrating may now need assistance letting a property and/or managing one. New non-resident landlords are the customer most agencies are currently focusing their advertising towards. The non-resident landlord is most likely to take your full property management package and with property management software like Rentview, you are fully equipped to offer your landlords the ultimate management package.

Checklist

So it is very important to have your website:

looking well
regularly updated
attracting new visitors
analytics set up to track visitor trends
linked to your social media

Over the next few blog posts, I will take you through how to do all of this in some very easy to follow steps. All of these elements should help you to increase your property portfolio by harnessing the power of the web.