Finding Tenants Without A Letting Agent- A Live Experiment (Part 1)

Ooooh, now this is going to be an interesting little experiment, in which I hope to put theory into practice.

A few months ago I wrote an article about how in a booming rental market (such as now) letting agents are a big, fat waste of money. I progressed to mention that all snake oil letting agents charge extortionate amounts of money for extremely little work that even a chimp could manage to successfully exceute while sucking on its momma’s nipples. I’m not saying that letting agents hold useless jobs, I’m just saying their price tags are ridiculous.

Most letting agents, from my experience, charge approximately 10% just to find tenants. 10% of my yearly rental income just to find me a tenant- are you fucking insane? If I have a property which generates £800pcm, that would accumulate to a yearly return of £9600. That would equate to a £960 fee. How is that justified? Psh. Credit checks and advertising doesn’t cost THAT much.

Since I refuse to fund the pockets of letting agents these days, I’m going to demonstrate how easy it can be to independently net tenants. I will say one thing though, in defence of letting agents; if you want immediate tenants, letting agents are generally very good as they should have a list of people already waiting for vacancies. If you have a few months to play around with, as I do, I definitely endorse undertaking the occupation of being a hunter. If worst comes to worse, and there’s only 2 weeks left until your property becomes vacant with very little prospect of finding a tenant, then you could always push your pride aside and seek the help of a dirty letting agent.

Disclaimer

Ok, before anyone has a mental masturbation over this demonstration, I’d just like to declare that I know a tonne of landlords have managed to gain tenants without the aid of letting agents and it’s no big deal. However, I’m documenting my process so others can see how I do my shit, and maybe even learn a few tricks.

The situation

A tenant of mine is vacating one of my properties on the 22nd of August; so that gives me a little over 2 months to find new tenants. I’m going to experiment with various methods of finding new tenants, hoping that I will:

Of course, the beauty about this experiment is that it’s all live, and the possibility of failure is always, well, possible. If I do end up failing I’m going to look like a complete dickface! But I refuse to let that happen because I firmly believe that the odds to succeed are on my side. No one is buying property right now, mainly because of 3 reasons:

SPREAD THE WORD

Obviously the first step of this task is to make people aware that the property is available for rent (from the 22nd of August) so I can get those enquiries flowing in. It’s a no-brainer- the more people I reach out to, the greater the chance of success.

Step 1) Online Social networking
It goes without saying that I’m a huge Internet freak; I live and breathe cyberspace. Failing to take advantage of the Internet when it comes to finding tenants IS criminal. The Internet reaches out to millions of people on a daily basis and the service is cheap as chips! Even my Nan discretely uses the Internet for porn- she thinks it’s the best thing since sliced bread.

Social networking sites are huge at the moment, applications like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and Bebo reach out to millions of members every second. Those sites have the ability to promote almost anything, whether it be to make a dogshit website of yours viral, or to make people aware of available rental properties.

I’m trying to target a very specific geographical niche, so there’s no point in me trying to reach out to people on the other side of the world. That’s why I think sites like Facebook and Bebo would be an ideal place to start- you get to target local people that you know. Even if they don’t bite, they can always inform someone else they know about the vancany…

Facebook
I have a little over 400 people on my Facebook friends list; 99% of which are locals. Every man and their dog has a Facebook account these days. If you’re one of those individuals that are firmly wedged in the stone ages, I suggest you wiggle around and crawl into the 21st century by registering!

(The next bit might be alien to those who don’t use Facebook)

The first thing I did on Facebook was change my Facebook status to:

I will have a 2 bedroom house for rent in Church Langley from August 22nd! £775pcm. Interested? Contact me.

That single action instantly fed that information to a potential base of 400 of my friends. The great thing about Facebook is that it’s extremely social- you can pretty much monitor everyone’s activity (if the user permits you to). Every time someone updates a status it will show across their entire network e.g in my case, all my friends.

I update my status every few hours so it’s constantly at the top of everyone’s minifeed. If you remain idle with the same status for too long it eventually gets pushed to the bottom, which ultimately lessons the exposure of the message. So here’s an example:

As you can see, the general message is always extremely similar, but the slight change tells Facebook that it’s a new status, so it gets pushed back to the top of everyone’s feed. Here’s an example on where it will show on everyone else’s page (as you can see the statuses are displayed in chronological order):

To strengthen my chances of success, I got a few of my other friends on Facebook to also put the same status up. If they get any enquiries, they’ll forward the details onto me.

Just by following those simple steps, before I knew it, I’ve generated an extremely usefull, free and powerful form of advertising in a matter of seconds.

Gumtree
Gumtree is an extremely popular free, classified website. You can list just about anything on there for the price of oxygen. Over the years it’s actually become notorious for being a hub for rental adverts, so a lot of wannabe-tenants look on there for properties to rent. I registered and put up a simple ad, specific to Essex (the location of my property).

Here’s what my advert looks like on Gumtree:

Step 2) Good old fashioned local advertising
Regardless of how far the Internet has come you can never beat good old fashioned advertising when you’re trying to flog something to the locals. You can’t target your audience anymore specifically than putting adverts up in your local corner shop window or your local Tesco’s pin-board.

The only problem with putting adverts up in your local grocery store, for example, is that everyone does it, so your advert could get lost amongst the mess. The key point is to make your advert stand out from the rest, making it compelling enough to attract attention. The average schmuck uses a shitty biro pen to scribble a few notes down on a piece of paper. Those types of adverts don’t enforce any attraction, and if they do, no one can make detangle the handwriting.

I spent about 30mins on the computer and came up with a design which I’m hoping will attract bystanders. I’m no graphic expert, but I think it’s good enough to make some form of impact. I’ve put this advert up in a few of my local shops, and various other places around town.

Here’s a scaled down version:

So far that’s all I’ve done; I’m actually hoping that’s all I’ll need to do. If no one bites with in a few weeks, I may try the local paper. In part 2 of this experiment I’ll give you all an update on the feedback I’ve received. Things could go either way in part 2, I could be introducing my new tenant, or I could be thinking of more ways to generate leads due to the lack of success.

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Shaz wrote, on Jun 21st, 2008

	Wow. You’ve got a wicked plan there my friend. Hope it all works out. Keep us updated plz n thnx.
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