4walls Blog

Here at 4 Walls, we have always been of the opinion that, as professional Landlords, we should offer a superior product and a superior service. As a Landlord, you are a "service provider" and therefore your success will be determined by the level of service you offer your clients. This has never been more true than in the challenging and competitive market conditions we are currently all experiencing.

Clients (tenants) have a great deal of choice, and they KNOW it.

We believe it will be the professional Landlords who survive and prosper in these challenging times.

Here are some of our tips to be a winner in the lettings game:

In areas of over-supply of rental stock, ensure your property stands out from the crowd. Give it a unique selling point. The days of identi-kit, "me too", magnolia boxes are over. Add a few upgrades and finishing touches to ensure your property is elevated above its competitors. An example of this is a friend of ours who has a lot of student lets. He fits all his houses with jacuzzi baths and students always pick his houses for obvious reasons! Look to see where you can create "lifestyle" touches i.e. garden furniture for the garden, plasma screen TV, etc.

Ensure "kerb appeal" from the outside, with a well kept garden and house name/no., with outside security light. We passed a property today where the Landlord hadn't bothered to put a house number on the door, and the developer's sign for the Plot Number was the only identification. There was also a large pile of old carpet in the front garden. This does not give the appearance of a "home" that the owner cares about.

Ensure your property is "staged" for marketing photographs and ensure that these are of high quality. Tenants "buy" from the photos far more than the marketing spiel, so ensure that the house is immaculately clean, the lights are on, there are some thoughtful finishing touches.

Make your property work on a practical level by putting in some finishing touches like mirrors, hooks on the back of doors, some nice handwash next to the basins, shelves, and storage solutions.

Ensure that the property is immaculately clean and maintained.

Offer incentives to get prospective tenants to commit. This could be anything from a crate of beer in the fridge, to six months free broadband, to six months gym membership included. (The Gym offers membership for £14.99 per month and is 24 hours per day. New gyms being added all the time. Have a look at www.thegymgroup.com for details).

It's worth paying a bit extra for decent mattresses. If your tenants can't get a good night's sleep, they will soon leave. Ensure that blinds/curtains block out all the light so tenants working on shifts can sleep during the day.

The days of "that I'll do 'em" are well and truly over. Treat a tenant like that, and you will turn your tenants over a lot faster and suffer more voids as a result.

If a maintenance problem arises, sort it within 24 hours. Use local trusted workmen or post your job on www.myhammer.co.uk to get a keen quote.

Keep an open and friendly dialogue with your tenants yourself (or through an approved agent) to ensure the continued enjoyment of their stay at your property. Treat even small problems or niggles seriously so that they feel valued as a tenant.

Tenants are increasingly worried that the Landlord may be planning on selling the property as soon as the market recovers, and they will then lose their home. Reassure your tenants that you are in this for the long-term and that the property will be available as long as they want it.

It is our advice not to rock the boat with an increase in rent at the moment. Tenants are worried about the economic down-turn and fearful about losing their jobs, so an increase in the rent might be enough to tip them over the edge to hand in their notice. This could lead to a void period, which should be avoided at all costs.

See where you can add value and give value at ever opportunity. A recent example from our portfolio: a tenant reported that the fridge had stopped working and that they had lost all their week's food supply. We got the fridge fixed straight away, but we also sent the tenant some vouchers towards replacing the lost food. This again makes the tenant feel valued.

Security is increasingly important to tenants. You should ensure that there is a security light outside and you could also consider a burglar alarm.

Budget for a face-lift for your property approx. every five years to keep it up to standard. Tenants respect a pleasant environment and are more likely to keep up standards if high standards have been set from the start of the tenancy.

In the current market conditions, be price sensitive with your rents. Remember: it is better to have 80% of something, rather than 100% of nothing! Even one month's void will eat into your profit, so endeavour to let your property out as quickly as possible, even if that means taking a hit on the rent.
You can offer an "introductory" special offer rent to be reviewed after six months.

Worth noting: With the new survery from the Halifax reporting massive outward migration from city centres, houses in the suburbs are less likely to suffer from over-saturation, and can be let on a single occupancy or multi-let basis.

Please add your tips below so that we can build up a wiki on how to be a professional and successful Landlord. It might sound obvious, but you will only be successful if tenants want to rent from you, and want to stay in your properties as long as possible!.

Those that treat tenants with respect and give value and add value at every turn will be the last Landlord standing!

You can read our Investor Blueprint here.

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Pictured above:  Camber Sands beach, East Sussex, voted one of the Top Ten Beaches in the World by the readers of the Sunday Times Travel magazine. 

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Morning, just a quick note: I went to London yesterday (17th Feb 2009) to see Seth Godin. (I'm a big fan and have been following and using his wise words for a number of years now).

I thought I would share with you one important aspect of what he had to say yesterday and that was "leadership, authenticity, and consistency". Now that the age of the "TV industrial complex" method of marketing is dead (2000 years since its inauguration), we have been, and are, moving into the new age of "business exposure".

Let me explain TV industrial complex. First of all, the action of the complex is this: company buys advertising space, puts an advert out to a mass market who he knows tunes in at the same time, makes money, buys more adverts …. And so the cycle continues.

However, this is what it means to you and me a.k.a. the consumer. Halfway through “Coronation Street”, we get some bloke running in our room shouting “CILIT BANG! BANG AND THE DIRT IS GONE!” and then he’s gone again. Moreover, you and I as the consumers have no choice to watch it unless we want to go for a pee or put the kettle on. This has been going on for centuries, but on the internet we call it SPAM!



TV/Radio advertising is SPAM, we have no choice on the TV or radio … but we do on the internet (lets face it Vanessa put up a post a few weeks ago “what’s happening to loveproperty” and look at the replies she had!) … if sites or marketeers continually spam we just go to another site. Moreover, if marketeers continually spam or are inconsistent and unauthentic with their message we will go to another site or just won’t do business with them.

From what I can see most marketing treats clients as if they are dense, and more importantly the client has very little chance of learning about the product or person they are buying. They were just “battered” by advertising and then “battered” by the kicking they got afterward because they bought a bad product, or trusted someone who did not have the right qualifications in the first place!

The Church understood this (the biggest blue-chip in the world is the Catholic Church). When books were first introduced to the populace, they were written by Monks, therefore, from day one the ad break did not feature Barry Scott and “Cillit Bang” but some chap with a pious nature. The rest is history.

The Church made a following out of advertising knowing that the people who they were advertising to had very little other choice.

Then came radio. Then came TV. The method was always the same: get a bunch of people together en-mass and subscribe to their fear and greed

Even now the method is the same: $2.6m for a 30 second advert during the Super Bowl !!! But the power of that is dying… I would argue is dead, but no one wants to let it go!

Why? Because you cannot apply that method to the internet.

How do you know what web-sites people are on at any one time? If you did know, how do you know to keep them watching your ad’ … it’s not like “if they didn’t they would miss the end of “Coronation St” … is it?

Now consumers have a choice and, just as importantly, they know it.

They do want to be “sold to”. They are consumers, but now they will dictate who they buy from … because you can’t hide on the internet.

1. No longer will clients follow a leader down a dead end;
2. No longer will clients put up with "inauthentic" messages;
3. No longer will clients put up with inconsistent messages.

They don’t need to, for the first time the Client will choose which advertising he/she will be exposed to … they will decide based on what they see or find on the internet.

The internet dictates that anyone who does not measure up will fall by the wayside. Darwin was right there, evolution is taking place as I write.

So it would appear to me that, whilst we still seem to have “marketeers” using an out-dated method of marketing, we can sit happily in the knowledge that they will become extinct. Not by our hand, you understand, but by their own.

You can spot who they are by applying the three points above. It’s obvious who does not fit anymore.

My point is this: long live sites like loveproperty.org and many of the qualified forums that don't allow spam. These forums give the future consumers a chance to “weed out” the dinosaurs and choose to work with the ones that count, the ones who have delivered real results, been authentic, consistent and more importantly, have led from the front.

Thanks to Loveproperty and thanks to Seth Godin.

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Obi Wan Kenobi:

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Charles Darwin: 1809 - 1882

I was tinkering on the computer last night, when, thanks to the joys of Facebook, an old friend from the music industry, who I hadn’t spoken to for ages, popped up on the instant messaging asking how I was doing.

It was great to catch up with her after so long, but it quickly became apparent that her life had changed dramatically. She told me that she had recently taken voluntary redundancy from her long-term job in the record industry. Her partner was also about to be made redundant from the computer games industry.

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 Click the above video to be taken to the BBC site.

 
Sir Richard Branson has said the recession will provide "massive" opportunities for entrepreneurs.

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