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Why a letting agency should use a tenants database

If your letting agency is a start up or your an established high street name many agencies feel that there is no need to manage your tenants effectively after the showing of their initially enquiry.

Agencies may not shout this from the roof tops but the majority of agencies take their tenant enquiries for granted. The typical attitude especially for agents in cities is “tenants are 10 a penny” and all they have to do is market the property and they will have 10 sets to view it the following evening.

The ineffective tenants database

I must admit that this was exactly what I had thought and my tenant database was normally my call history on my phone and my email enquiries in my inbox. Both of these methods of keeping track of enquiries is by no means a database and after 24 hours has passed the previous tenant enquiries are lost in your inbox.

Tenant Database for some agencies 

For some agencies a notebook with details such as number and area of interest is what they call a database, but its simply not effective enough in todays market. With more time out of the office and with other agents in the office using their own diary’s and notepads the office cant all benefit from one database.

Agencies that use these systems in the end will let properties but they could have been doing things a lot more efficiently and effectively if they had been using a real tenant database or management system. 

Other Benefits of Having a Tenants Database

Think outside of the box for a moment and ask how a tenants database could help your agency. A big reason landlords use agencies is because they have tenants looking for property. So if you market your tenants database to landlords you should increase the number of inbound enquiries and listings. 

A New Way of Marketing your Tenants Database

Rather then just saying you have tenants looking for units straight away you can get FREE Tenant management software from Rentview which shows your tenant database numbers. This free software not only allows you to manage enquiries, store tenants criteria and matches tenants to properties but it also allows you to market your database through a real time widget which is easily plugged into your website.

Whats a widget?

A widget is a website feature that can be installed on to a website. It is simple piece of programming code that you can copy and paste into your website. 

Example of the Widget

What does the Rentview Widget do

The tenant database widget shows your website visitors how many tenants you have on your database in real time. It can then be clicked on to show more information such as tenants areas of interest, budgets etc.

Try the Tenant Management Database for FREE

Just go directly to Rentview.com

So why do you have a letting agency website?

This is a question I ask many of the letting agents that contact me asking for advice and help on how to build their rental portfolio.

Target market of your website

The first step in your letting agency website design is to understand what is the target market of your website. When I ran my lettings business my websites target market was landlords.

What about tenants

I would have loved for tenants to type in a term such as "flats to rent in Watford" and for my site to appear but the reality is that the Property Portals will take up the majority of the first 2 search page results As shown below

So as a result I think its best if you leave the portals to find you tenants and your own website focused on your target market generating new landlord business.

How to attract Landlords to your website

You may have the best looking letting agency website with the best call to actions but without having relevant visitors coming on to your site its all useless

The first step in your letting agency website design is to understand what your target market is looking for on the web. Try this - If you type in a search such as "letting agents Watford" the results you get back is mainly letting agents websites. Now this is where it gets interesting for you as an agency with a website. If you develop your website for your the target market of "landlords" it becomes a lot easier to start to rank on the first page if not the top 3 very quickly. See below example

Designing your letting agency website 

The absolute number 1 rule without a doubt is to ensure your website is mobile optimised. By this I mean that regardless of what device (iPhone, iPad, Desktop, laptop etc) your on the website is displayed where it can be read without zooming in or adjusting the page. 45% of your website visitors will use a device with a smaller screen then your desktop when visiting your page. 

If your website is not mobile optimised or responsive that means that nearly half of your website visitors could be leaving your website before they even read the opening line on your website.

Please see below for an example of a site which is not responsive and mobile optimised. 

Expecting your website visitors to zoom in and move from left to right in order to read your website is expecting too much, expect them to bounce straight off your site more like. 

Simple design is best

Visitors to your website need to understand what your letting agency does within seconds of reaching your homepage. If they want to read what services you provide within your letting division you need to allow the visitor to navigate to this page easily. A website visitors attention span is rapidly dwindling down and they say if you don't engage within 10 seconds your visitor is gone.......  

I really like the KISS acronym (Keep it simple stupid) which is a design principle noted by the US Navy, it states that systems work best if they are kept simple. I firmly believe that a website acts in the same way

Easy Call to actions

50% of your websites visitors will be after hours so having easy call to actions where your visitors (landlords) can leave contact details or ask for someone to call really is ESSENTIAL.

Social Proofing through Google Reviews

A new visitor to your website who has not received a personal recommendation for your services will want to build trust when visiting your site. We are in an age of information and many people simply "Google It" if they want to find information out on a certain company , topic etc. Having landlord and tenant reviews of your agency is a great way to build trust. 

Long gone are the days where a simple one line testimonial followed by a sign off sufficed as a good review. Nowadays I find people are more cautious and want proof that its original, they call this social proofing. 

Built in Google reviews

This is something that the letting agency website design team in Rentview liked so much that they now feed reviews directly on to your website. This way the site is kept current and visitors can see the latest reviews instantly. (and dont worry you can automatically only allow reviews to appear which have 1,2,3,4 or even 5 star up only appear)

Is it important to list your available properties on your website?

Yes most definitely, even though I say that your #1 target market for the website is landlords they often like to scan your listings to see how busy you are. The question I would ask is how important is it for the properties to be hosted on your own website (this is where you upload the properties to your website through its backend or letting agency software such as Rentview) 

if they are hosted on your own site it gives more SEO juice (lets Google know you have properties to let and sends more traffic to your site). However it may mean uploading property data to portals and your own wesbite in order to do this if you dont use letting agency software. Now that may not seem a problem now but as you grow double entry can be a real time consumer. 

You can however save time by feeding your website with data from a property advertising portal you are using of all your properties. This is quite easy to do and most portals provide this facility through an API or RSS feed

About us

its most likely the second most viewed page on your website and letting agents are in the service industry so visitors want to know who is providing the services. This is a great place to let visitors know a little information on the company and the team. 

Try and personalise the information you are giving and make sure to include a head shot image. 

Letting agency website Design

This is my sales bit ;-) .......

The Rentview team feel that these are some of the most important factors for your letting agency website design. If you have not gotten a website designed yet or are still talking to developers I would highly recommend reaching out and talking with myself on how we can help grow or start your agency. 

We all know how hard it is to find the right rental property. Our flat hunting meme shows you what people might think of your flat hunting.

Its just for fun ;-)

Cleaning costs is one of the top reasons why deposit money is withheld when a tenant moves out of a rented property, so how can you avoid losing your deposit or the best part of it?

When it comes to the time for rental deposits to be returned to tenants in a rental property, fear and dread can strike – will you get the full amount back? And it is not just the tenants that fear the worst – landlords can be left worried that tenants have left damage to the property or left it in a mess.

In accordance with the results of the survey of landlords and agents, often cleaning cost is quoted as one of the main reasons for deposit issues to arise.

Of those that did keep some of the deposit, 78% reported the most common factor was to pay for cleaning costs after the tenant had left, which can result in a costly professional cleaner coming into the property. Also unpaid rent was another major cause for withholding the deposit. Other issues included damage to property and missing items which were on the inventory when a tenant moved in.

As a Tenant you can avoid retention of the deposit by simply leaving the property clean and tidy. 

If you ever sell something you obviously want to present it to the purchaser in the best possible light. You will make sure its clean and has no damage, you wouldn't present it all dirty and grimy with bits missing off it - so why return a rented property back to the landlord in a similar manner? In the end if its dirty its only going to make the landlord even more suspicious and will then start looking for all sorts of problems. Take the time to deep clean over , the kitchen and bathroom especially and if this is something you cant do well Clean2Let are here to help you with their End of Tenancy Cleaning.

The best way to avoid deposit deductions is to actually meet with their landlord or agent when moving out and inspect the property together, and then come to an agreement over the return of the deposit.

As a Tenant you protect yourself by checking off against the inventory when you move in for a starter and if one is not provided do one yourself. Also it is really necessary to take photographs of the property to prove the condition and whether it was with some spots or was spotlessly clean. We discussed an inventory service in our last blog through the Rentview tenants profile.