rentview – Page 2

October 22, 2012

Letting Agency Marketing Tools

Today we are going to look at 3 free tools on the web available to letting agents throughout the world online to market their services on. The digital age is in full swing, and the way people communicate and digest information is completely different to those of the same age five years ago.

So my top 3 tools for Letting Agency Marketing are:

letting-agency-marketing

#1 Vimeo or YouTube Video blogs

Ever started reading something and then realised it’s so long that by the time you have gotten to the end you forgot what the hell it was about? Well in my opinion, long-winded product or service descriptions are becoming more and more outdated and people want to be shown or told visually rather than textually. So take the first step and start recording some videos to release to your landlords and tenants. We prefer to use the vimeo service due to the quality of the video.

You can also watch our video on how to set up a letting agency video channel.

#2 Pinterest Picture Sharing

As I mentioned before, the days of everything being described or sold in text are long gone. Images rule nowadays. Why not get creative with some original imagery to go along with your marketing messages? We do it a lot on our Facebook page and it is a nice break from the usual content people would expect. We are slowly building our Pinterest page with a wide range of photos from the team out on the field, business events, funny viral images and more. Check the page out here.

#3 Facebook and Twitter Pages

I am presuming that many letting agents and estate agents will have already got this far with their marketing, but many do it wrong or see now value in using social media Facebook and Twitter for business. Social media is important these days, whether you like it or not.

Have realistic expectations, though. I don’t follow an agency to find out every single listing they have available, likewise I don’t like a Facebook page to constantly hear what’s on offer from the agency. Use it as a customer development tool and start running some competitions or posting some interesting and funny relevant content to get a buzz going about your agency.

by Rentview

October 12, 2012

Lettings Management Industry- a PEST Analysis

Some of you will have read the article last week on business strategy for letting and estate agents in the Lettings Management Industry, which received a good response, so I am continuing in a similar theme this week. Obviously we discussed what strategies agencies can take to the market, but before you get anywhere close to deciding on your strategy towards achieving a competitive advantage, you have to first do some analysis. Analysing the situation you are in as an agency will involve:

internal analysis (factors unique to the agency like routines, capabilities, strengths and weaknesses) and
external analysis which is where I am going to start today.

lettings-management-industry-PEST-ANALYSIS

So external analysis involves factors outside of the agency’s control and common tools business analysts use are; PEST analysis (political, economic , social and technology factors), Driving forces, Key success factors, Industry Life Cycle and Industry forces. One of the most prominent and more important tool is the PEST analysis, which many of you will be already familiar with. So here we go:

Political: This is where business activity in the industry is restricted due to either laws or interest groups. The first thing that comes to mind is the new property services regulatory authority. In a previous blog, we learned that several Irish agencies had to re-apply for their licences after failing to have the correct information prepared for the body. There is also new regulation set to be brought in next year on the monitoring of monies in client accounts.

Economic: These factors are mainly to do with the purchasing power and spending patterns in the market. The question a company usually asks themselves here is are people willing to spend on the services provided in the industry. In Ireland this, in my opinion, is a ‘no’ to the vast majority of landlords, tenants, home-sellers and any other customers of letting or estate agents. This is down to one simple factor of people not having as much money to spend anymore. The one area I might say the consumer is willing to spend on is the sale of a home, as it may be urgent or important to get the highest price obviously.

lettings-management-industry

What every agency in the Lettings Management Industry wants, a bunch of happy tenants, landlords & homeowners.

Social : Social factors affecting the industry include the population trends, family size, diversity and education. So thanks to Indexmundi.com, I gathered some stats on some of the key trends I think are effecting the industry currently. Things are good and bad, our population is still rising and currently stands at 4.72 Million, up from 4.67 last year. Net Migration rate is down from 4.5 to 1.6 per thousand. This means there is less and less people coming to Ireland. And lastly the birth rate is 15.8/1000 which again is down from 16.5 in 2010. In my opinion, these stats are not good for the industry.

Technological : Technology is the final piece to this puzzle we have been trying to solve. Currently I would think technology is actually affecting areas of the property services industry such as management, sales and lettings, marketing and customer relations. As we become more and more fond of our devices and technologies, agencies must adapt to suit their market. This may involve having a digital strategy in marketing their services or a C.R.M system to manage their clients.

This analysis applies to the Lettings Management Industry specifically, but it can be applied to any business.

That’s it for this week’s business strategy blog. Thanks for reading!

by Rentview

October 2, 2012

Starting a Letting Agency – Letting agency business strategy

So you’re thinking about starting a Letting Agency?

Back again with another business blog, and today I am going to recall some of my global strategic management knowledge to help break down the different letting agent strategies. Starting a Letting Agency involves a good bit planning and strategy. If you know anything of business strategies, you will have heard of Michael Porter, a leading opinion leader on business strategy and lecturer at the professor at Harvard Business school.

Image: Michel Porter’s Generic Strategies for Letting Agents

starting-a-letting-agency-strategy-

A popular approach that he believes for any company to take is the generic focus strategy. And what this means is you are either going to try and be the best on the market or you are going to try to be the cheapest (See Image above). On both occasions you are looking to work towards one thing, a competitive advantage in the industry, for the purpose of this blog we are going to discuss the lettings and management industry.

So what I decided to do to show you a quick example of two different letting agents with two opposite strategies is jump on Google and see whats on offer with agents in Ireland. Within a few minutes, I stumbled upon two agents advertising with VERY different approaches, one taking the low-cost strategy and one offering a premium and differentiated service to landlords for lettings.

Agency 1 – Mannix Ryan Estate Agents

starting-a-letting-agency-case-study-1

Letting agency Strategy Case Study 1

This agency stuck out to me in particular because of their claim to be the only agency doing what they do. This is a clear attempt at gaining a competitive advantage due to their superiority and different offering, compared to every other agent in Ireland. Even comparing their website and the social media tags below the text to others, I have seen that it is clear that this service is based around quality and not price, in fact there is no mention of how much it costs. So the value proposition to the landlord is on innovation through the use of video. Now we look at another agent offering the same service but differently.

Letting agency strategy Case Study 2

starting-a-letting-agency-case-study2

Now we look at the low-cost letting agent. As you can see from this advertisement, that I came across on Daft.ie , everything about the company and the brand screams low-cost. This is in stark contrast to above where the product offering was describing in detail the excellent service and differentiated marketing ability they offer. A great example of one the biggest companies in the world who has gained and sustained a competitive advantage in their market, based around choosing a focus strategy on costs is Ryanair. On the flip side, a company who has developed a sustainable competitive advantage based on differentiation and innovation/quality is Apple, who charge big bucks for their products.

So there you have some basic business strategy examples for starting a letting agency. I guess I wanted to find out what agents are doing at the moment and how effective are they finding their business strategy in terms of increasing their landlords, tenants, properties and revenues. Is one strategy better in the other, can we find a balance between the two?

I’d love to hear your thoughts, or if you have any questions, do get in touch!

by Rentview

The following may be of interest:

Letting agent marketing strategy

Why use Youtube for marketing

Rent management software

September 10, 2012

Rentview Featured on Siliconrepublic.ie

OK so a little late sharing this with you, had this in drafts to go be published Friday but Rentview was featured on major Tech news site siliconrepublic.ie last week. The Irish website featured an article on the new Rentview Tenant Profile service we offer to tenants. The full article including quotes from Rentview co-founder Colin Napper is below, please share this with your friends to help us out:

Irish online rent and property management start-up Rentview has just soft launched a new service for renters so they can build up a a free online tenant profile for landlords and agents.

Rentview itself was co-founded in 2010 as a rent and property management cloud-based platform for estate and letting agencies. The site’s co-founders are Andreas Riha and Colin Napper, both previous owners of a letting agency in Dublin.

Napper said they soft launched the servicethis week to tie in with students looking for properties, as the new college year kicks off.

“The purpose is to allow people to build a profile, upload references and share them with landlords and agents to get rentals more quickly.”

He said the service also includes an inventory app that works on the iPhone and will shortly be working on Android devices.

“The inventory app will allow people to document the condition of a rental property once they have received the rental offer from an agency. This means they can protect their deposit.”

Napper said that via this app people can log photos and they can also speak into their phone to dictate their voice notes and create a report on what the property looked like when they moved in. “They can print that report off and get it signed by the landlord. Then, when they are moving out tenants can do a moving out report.”

He said tenants can make their overall profile private and allow agents and landlords to access it by sharing their URL and a unique password.

According to Napper, rentals in Ireland are up 47pc since 2007, meaning there is strong competition for the right property.

He said the aim is to launch the tenant profile service in other markets over the coming months.

Click the share buttons above the article to help us raise awareness of this super new service for tenants. Thanks guys and this week we are looking to push out some interesting and helpful content to the property community, Cormac.

September 5, 2012

Rentview Launches new Free service for Tenants

The team have been hard at work lately preparing for the launch of https://tenant.rentview.com/ a new free service to tenants. The new service was designed to help a tenant through the letting cycle by:

Aiding them in securing a property and becoming more marketable.
Help with the moving in process and management of Utilities.
Help them protect their deposit and the landlords assets through Inventories
Act as a payment reference for future properties or loan requirements

All great services to offer to people currently renting property throughout Ireland and abroad.Take a look at the homepage below for a better idea of the service:

As mentioned in point one above the online service aids a tenant in securing the desired property of their choice. Once a tenant joins tenant.rentview.com they can start building their profile. This can include uploading a profile image and a short description of who you are and your requirement. You can also begin to upload some previous landlord references, a work or college reference , guarantors reference etc. All of this important information is now stored in one secure place and ready to be shared with the landlord or letting agent of a property you wish to rent. This saves you time and money in organising your references and also improves your chances of securing a property which may be in high demand. Here is a quick video describing how to get started with your account:

I will be continuing this blog series over on the new tenant blog at http://rentviewtenantprofile.tumblr.com/ along with the student renting series. Look out for some more great content on this blog as we look to continue the online marketing series and up the humorous content too! Thanks for listening guys, follow me at @Rentview_ and the new @Rentview_Tenant profile and don’t forget to like us on Facebook here and here.

by Rentview

August 16, 2012

How much does it cost to lodge rents to your bank

Bank charges may affect your revenue

Is your letting agency collecting monthly rental payments? Are you aware of what your bank charges on cash deposits are?

It is eating into your profit margins. Even if you are managing only 10 units with a rental of €1,000 per month per unit, it’s going to cost your agency a whopping €600 per year. Below is an infographic of what Irish banks are charging their business customers for dealing with cash.

bank-charges-on-cash-deposits

So you want to streamline the rent collection service you are offering within your agency? Read this blog.

Stop this headache, administration nightmare and cost by moving your agency to Rentview.

Letting Agency Software

As always we would love to hear your feedback.

Please feel free to Tweet, Share, Like and everything else that makes us social 😉

by Andreas Riha

August 7, 2012

Property inventory report

Following on from last week’s Video Blog (Rental property inventories and why agents should provide them) I now wanted to show you how easy and quick creating a Rentview inventory actually is. Here I go through how easy creating a property inventory report is.

Rentview inventory reports are a great way of creating a transparent renting experience for both clients (landlord & tenant) for a letting agency. By creating a property inventory report at the start of a lease, an agent can now improve the offering to the landlord and tenant. It will also reduce the possibility of disputes at the end of a lease term regarding the condition of a property.

by Andreas Riha

August 3, 2012

Property News : The Friday Wrap Up

Welcome to the new Friday wrap where we we bring you the top stories in the property industry from around Ireland and the rest of the world.

Monday On Monday Ulster Bank settled a case with property developer and owner of the Harcourt building in Dublin David Agar, its speculated up to €30 Million in loans were written off as well as €1M legal fees paid. Monday also saw NAMA launch a new website for selling its properties throughout Ireland and the UK (See the Image below),Full story here. Wrapping up the top stories from Monday we have Tom McFeely the man responsible for the disaster story of priory hall this year being declared bankrupt in Ireland and not the solely the UK, read more here.

Tuesday 31st June 2012

Yahoo Homes had a great post on Tuesday noting the top ways to make your home look bigger, Jeffrey Blum a designer from NY has some truly unique & interesting way of making your apartment look bigger & better
Tuesday also brought some welcome news on property disputes in the UK as Letting Agent Today reported that the Tenancy Deposit Scheme’s adjudication team are resolving most disputes in just 16 days! As Rentview co-founder said it best-take note PRTB!
The last nugget from Tuesday came from Conor Pope of the Irish Times as he reported the worry spreading throughout the renting community as banks look to collect rents directly from tenants.
Wednesday had a great start to the day as our team learned we had been nominated in the category of ‘Most Insightful and Intriguing Internet Innovation’ at the Net Visionary Awards 2012 , voting s set to open in the near future so stay tuned and be sure to support Ireland’s leading provider of Letting Agent software

Simon Carswell of Irish Times reported yesterday that 20% of Irish mortgages are set to default on their loan repayments with the trend looking to continue into the future according to credit rating agency Fitch.

So did we miss anything? What do you think were the major headlines in property this week?

Please feel free to Tweet, Share, Like and everything else that makes us social 😉

August 2, 2012

Rental property inventories and why agents should provide them

A property inventory is a crucial tool in the property manager’s tool belt for all let and manage residential units. Its also a great way to create an additional revenue stream for your let-only clients.

Why a property manager should provide rental inventories from Rentview on Vimeo.

Historically, the inventories provided by the majority of agents were written reports, they were time-consuming to compile and really only protected against the theft of an item.

If a dispute arose at the end of a tenancy about the condition of a said item, it normally would result in one of the agent’s clients being unhappy. As both landlords and tenants are clients of the agent, it is essential to protect both parties against disputes.

Now, through the Rentview Inventory App, you can provide that transparent inventory easily. This is proven to be a great way to improve customer service and reduce end of tenancy disputes.

As always we would love to hear your feedback.

Please feel free to Tweet, Share, Like and everything else that makes us social 😉

by Andreas Riha

So my top 3 tools for Letting Agency Marketing are:

So you’re thinking about starting a Letting Agency?

Letting agency Strategy Case Study 1

Letting agency strategy Case Study 2

Bank charges may affect your revenue

Cloud computing systems – benefits to agents