Here is a thought leadership article from Spectre

Agents typically tend to dedicate more time to prospecting for sales instructions than actively prospecting for new landlords. Yet according to research commissioned by Kerfuffle, the average lifetime value of a landlord is considerably higher than that of a returning sales client.

In fact, securing a landlord is worth £19,424 on average to your agency. It’s clear just how much more lucrative it is to target landlords - so don’t forget about them when it comes to your prospecting!

Many agents actually already have access to a wealth of landlord information but are sitting on it and letting it gather dust. And when agents do consult this data, they’re often surprised at how many of their existing landlords are actually letting their other properties through competing agents.

Benefits of landlord prospecting
As mentioned above, the lifetime value of a landlord is two-fold that of a typical vendor. This is because rental properties need a lot more care and attention than purchased properties due to shorter occupancies.

According to Property Investor Today, tenants stay in a rental property for only 21 months on average… whereas just 9% of homeowners sell within 2 years of purchase (as per data provided by Spectre, the UK’s leading instruction generation tool). This means that managing agents regularly need to find new tenants for rental properties... and they get paid for it each time.

Landlord prospecting is a no-brainer… the hard part is how to locate them, target them, and engage them. However, if done right, the results far outweigh the effort. If your lettings agency can secure a landlord and turn them into a loyal client, you will benefit significantly from it.

Focusing on portfolio landlords
Compared to accidental landlords and those with only one investment property, landlords with multiple properties in their portfolio naturally have the highest return on marketing spend. This is where agents should think about focusing their attention if they want to expand their management portfolio in the quickest possible way.

By contacting these landlords when they list a rental property, during the tenancy and at the end of a tenancy, your agency will have a greater chance of winning these instructions and generating additional revenue by discussing rent rises, local market trends, the landlord’s portfolio, and any investment plans for the future.

Identifying portfolio landlords
There are two main ways to identify portfolio landlords: manually or using intelligent prospecting software.

The manual process of finding landlords with more than one property means going through your own landlord database and cross-referencing to see who owns multiple properties. While this is the more traditional approach, manually trawling through your database can be incredibly time consuming and can often deliver erroneous results.

Using smart prospecting tools to identify portfolio landlords is generally much more efficient and accurate. The best prospecting tools will streamline the entire process by cross-referencing data from an agent’s Land Registry purchases and their personal data upload, to see if they already have any portfolio landlords within their account.

As we said, it’s common for agents to be sitting on useful landlord information without even realising, so these tools can help provide a comprehensive prospecting list - ready for you to begin creating tailored letters and postcards to try and win the rest of a landlord’s portfolio.

How to successfully locate a landlord
One big reason agents find landlord prospecting more difficult than just winning new sales instructions is because while they know the tenant’s address, they don’t always know the landlord’s address… and if your prospecting campaigns aren’t landing in the right hands, they aren’t going to generate as good results.

What’s the solution? This is where you will benefit from a prospecting system with a Land Registry integration - allowing you to purchase the title deeds of a rental property. For just a small charge, you could quickly and easily attain the landlord’s name and home address and begin marketing to them directly. Just imagine if you could target one landlord, but add multiple rental properties to your portfolio in one fell swoop.

Whether it’s manually locating portfolio landlords, or finding them using automated tools, prospecting for landlords is much more lucrative in the long run for agents. If you’re not already conducting this form of prospecting or actively growing your lettings portfolio, this should be at the very top of your list of new year’s resolutions!

Who are Spectre?
Spectre is the UK’s leading and most advanced instruction generation tool. Proven to generate incredible results, Spectre helps estate and letting agents increase market share, whilst saving time and effort by supercharging multiple key areas of their agency.

- Over 79,000 portfolio landlords identified
- Generates average RoI of over 3,000%
- £69 Million + fees generated from off-market instructions

Click here to view their exclusive deal for Kerfuffle members as well as check out their reviews