Whilst I don’t claim to be a guru, mentor, trainer, thought leader or even an expert in the industry, I do often get asked for help and advice and the most popular questions I’m asked are:
1) “How do we find more landlords?
2) “Where should we invest our marketing budget?”
The answers I find myself saying time and time again are - invest in time, processes and training because you often have the landlords already, you just don’t utilise it. Play the long game.
The perfect database scenario…
Let me expand on this. And bare with me – you might start reading this and think it’s incredibly obvious and totally unrealistic. But I’m going to share some simple processes with you that will hopefully persuade you otherwise. So here it goes: your lettings agency should be striving to have a database that includes every property that is rented out in your trading area, that you can build upon and add vital information to such as key dates and landlord contact information. Don’t think this is realistic? Why?
And how to achieve it
Here are the processes I promised you that will help you work towards this perfect scenario. In my experience most agents will claim to do all of the below, but on simple checks, they do it adhoc at best. The very best agents will have a process and can clearly demonstrate they’re followed rigorously:
• Every sales & lettings applicant whose position is ‘In Rented” becomes a landlord lead, cross reference the address with your lettings/FS/sales database, even if you don’t have the landlord’s details, add the property to your “rented property” database.
• Every lettings Applicant whose position is ‘in rented’ becomes a potential landlord lead, cross reference the address with your lettings/FS/sales database, even if you don’t have the landlord’s details, add the property to your “rented property” database.
• Every rental listing which comes available on the portals, find the address, cross reference with the databases and worst case, add to your ‘rented property’ database.
• More than 50% of landlords own more than 1 property, where is the process to ask if they own any more.
• Investment/B2L applicants on the sales database, both current and historic, how many already own a rented property and how many went on to buy one?
• Financial services database, how many buy-to-let leads have you passed your advisor? If they didn’t buy via your agency, what did you do with the data? Archived it I imagine.
• List popular buy-to-let locations and look for historic sales records, check the buyer’s position or mortgage position which will tell you if they were B2L but also check the viewers and many of them would also have been, or become landlords.
These are basic tasks that we’ve all heard of or done in the past, but how many managers or business owners actually check the process is being followed constantly? How often are you checking Rightmove intel and randomly picking a property that was listed the previous month and checking that, as a minimum it has been added to the “rented property” database.
The conversations that worked well for me
You’ll have your own way of doing things and it’s probably a far better approach than I ever took, but I thought I’d share the approach that worked well for me anyway just in case it gives you some ideas.
The following conversation will hopefully give you not only the name and number of a local landlord who is likely to have a vacant property in the near future, but also provides a really good reason to make contact without selling.
“Mr/s tenant, demand is really high at the moment and we have multiple tenants for every property. I would love for you to be one of the first calls we make on suitable properties, but as I’m sure you can appreciate, a number of our landlords prefer it if we pre-screen tenants. Would it be possible for me to contact your current landlord and get a verbal reference for you? If that’s ok, when I’m arranging viewings or presenting offers it puts you in a really good position.”
Now you can contact the landlord and have a conversation that could go a bit like this with outcome being a subtle reminder of how you go that extra mile for your clients:
“Mr/s landlord, it’s Richard here from Kerfuffle Estates. Before you hang-up I can assure you this isn’t a sales pitch but more a request for a favour. You might be aware that the market is extremely busy at the moment and at Kerfuffle Estates we are seeing unprecedented demand and record rents achieved. The reason for my call is that we like to go the extra mile for our landlords and get as much information as possible before considering any tenant. Carrying out standard agency credit checks will tell us if they have good credit and the employment reference will confirm salary but neither tell us what sort of tenant they have been. Could I ask you just a few questions?
- have they looked after the property?
- Would you let to them again?
- If you could rank them out of 10, what would you score them?”
How you continue the conversation will depend how receptive the landlord has been, but as a minimum you have contact details for a landlord who now knows you go the extra mile.
To conclude, I think that there are some really great products available to not only assist on the above but to help find new landlords, and I wholeheartedly encourage everyone to explore all of the options, but if you don’t mind playing the longer game, this will work.
*One caveat around any of the above is your interpretation of GDPR, Every company has a slightly different policy and have taken different measures to make sure the data is complaint.
Read the first blog in the series here: Lifetime value of a sales customer vs lettings customer
Read the second blog in the series here: A simple script to help generate more revenue from lettings
Read the fourth blog in the series here: Let Only - To renew or not to renew, that is my question!
Read the fifth blog in the series here: Do you grade your stock?
Read the sixth blog in the series here: Does one size fit all?
Read the seventh blog in the series here: How can you get landlords instantly?
