property managment

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 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!

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!