What landlords look for in a letting agency

There are a few key things that landlords will look for in a letting agency to ensure that their properties are being handled efficiently and effectively.

Landlords should see the ease you provide for them and realise that it is equivalent to the fees that your agency is charging.

Essentially, landlords are paying letting agencies to take the work off of their hands, free up their time, and provide a higher level of service to current and potential tenants. As an agency, landlords should be able to see the value in paying for your professional letting services. 

Value for money 

For landlords to choose your agency, they want to be sure that they will be receiving the best value for their money. Not only does this include how well your agency manages their properties, but it is also dependent on the levels of customer service that are provided. 

Making sure that your agency has an efficient process for managing maintenance requests, remaining compliant, selecting tenants, and managing tenant requests is vital in making landlords feel like they are getting the best value for their money. 

The reputation of your agency

Your agency’s reputation plays a huge role when landlords are searching for letting agencies and trying to decide which one to choose to manage their properties. 

Ensuring that your agency has good reviews will significantly increase the likelihood of landlords choosing your business rather than your competitors. If your agency is receiving good reviews from landlords, then there is a good chance they will also spread positive word of mouth about your agency.

Ultimately, if your agency isn’t well-regarded, landlords are going to look elsewhere.

Effectively dealing with maintenance requests

Maintenance is often the area of property management that landlords find the most time-consuming and can be a large reason why they choose an agency to manage their portfolio. 

Inefficiency when dealing with maintenance requests can lead to long response times, decreased tenant satisfaction and high tenant turnover, which will affect your landlords’ faith in your agency.

Your agency should therefore have the tools and processes in place to be able to deal with maintenance requests quickly and efficiently. 

Some property management softwares have custom maintenance workflows that automate much of the process for you. Saving you valuable time and enabling you to cut down your response times. 

Having efficient maintenance processes implemented in your letting agency will boost landlords’ confidence in your agency’s ability to manage their portfolios.

Remaining compliant

Remaining compliant can be particularly difficult for landlords, especially when managing an extensive portfolio of properties. Compliance is often easily overlooked and forgotten.

The market is constantly changing and there are frequent regulation changes and introductions by the government which have made landlords question whether it’s worth continuing in the private rented sector or divesting their portfolio. Your agency should take that stress away from them, ultimately making their lives much easier.

Landlords don’t want to have to worry about forgetting whether or not certain certificates have been completed or if their gas safety is up to date. Letting agencies must keep up with the compliance on every property and make sure that everything is in order. Having a complete list of everything that needs to be done for each property is a great way of making sure that nothing slips through the cracks.

Landlords are looking for agencies that are able to handle compliance matters in the most time-efficient manner, whilst making sure that they are kept in the loop. To help with this, automation is a great way to keep all parties updated where required.  Automation will allow letting agents to create automated reminders that will notify you when certificates are due to expire (or have expired) and notify you when inspection renewals are needed.

Additionally, when handling tenant and landlord information, data security is a large part of your agency remaining compliant. Letting potential landlords know all the measures you have in place to keep their data safe, such as storing it on a secure cloud-based system, will reassure them that your agency is being compliant with their data.

Full visibility of their properties

Landlords want to have visibility of their portfolios and to be able to access information about any of their properties from anywhere at any time rather than having to constantly call or email your agency for updates.

It’s common for landlords to encounter communication issues with their tenants as a result of decentralised channels of communication. In some cases, messages can get lost or may never be received. As a result, miscommunication may occur between both parties, lowering tenant satisfaction.

Creating more access points for landlords to view their information and send messages to letting agents easily will boost the visibility and accessibility of key information. For example, giving your landlords access to a personalised dashboard could help your agency achieve more visibility. This eliminates the need for unnecessary calls, emails and messages to or from the same client.

 Providing landlords with comprehensive information that is both accessible and digestible will eliminate the feeling that they are wasting unnecessary time and constantly having to stay on top of your agency. Less time will be spent updating landlords and the dashboards will help to boost landlords’ confidence in the letting agency’s ability to manage their properties.