I Didn’t Receive A Single Enquiry From Tepilo
Written by The Landlord on 04 Oct 2010
After hearing a lot of hype from all angles about Tepilo, I eagerly listed a vacant rental property on their website. Tepilo is a platform created by the wonderful Sarah Beeny, so naturally it’s been heavily promoted. The website allows you to take independent control of buying, selling or letting your property – with no charges or commission.
Well, that was royally disappointing.
I have no idea how Tepilo perform for vendors trying to sell their property, but based on my quick and painful experience, I can confirm that lead generation for landlords trying to find tenants was a total flop. I didn’t receive a single enquiry in 3 weeks. I didn’t even receive a spam email from the Ambassador of Nigeria or an invitation to get my penis enlarged! I haven’t even bothered removing the advert from their website even though I have found tenants because there’s actually no reason to. I’m probably doing them a favour by keeping it on.
The advertised property is located in a popular part of town in a popular part of Essex, so I was expecting at least one enquiry. It’s not like it’s located on a hill top somewhere in the middle of nowhere, where shagging sheep is accustomed. However, I still managed to receive nada! Slitch! Not a god damn thing!
I listed the same property on Gumtree, and received several solid enquiries pretty sharpish and hundreds of page views. Unlike Gumtree, Tepilo doesn’t display how many people viewed each advert – it’s a shame they don’t show that data because I’d be interested to see if anyone actually looked at my advert.
Why did Teplio fail me?
Obviously I can only speculate, but I suspect the following reasons have something to do with their failure…
Still a young site
Tepilo is still in it’s nappy stages; it’s only been around since mid 2009, so like a baby it’s still squeezing green diarrhoea through the pipes.
I submitted a few searches and discovered they don’t have many properties available for rent on there. With such little choice, I can’t imagine many users would stick around.
Secondly, I don’t think the website gets much traffic. Actually, based on a few test results from traffic monitoring websites, I suspect my blog gets more traffic than Tepilo. Yes, a shitty little blog by an extremely sexy landlord getting more traffic than a highly marketed property portal – seems twisted and wrong, doesn’t it? Nice on my ego, however.
What’s the name “Teplio” about?
I’ve never understood why the name “Tepilo” was chosen. I remember reading somewhere that Sarah Beeny named the site Tepilo because her dad used to tell her about a place called Tepilo as a child. That’s a cute story, it really is, but it’s a poor choice for a property website that’s trying to gain mass traffic.
I have a huge gripe with the name Tepilo. It makes no branding sense to me because it’s difficult to remember/spell. If someone said, “yeah, check out the website Tepilo if you want to sell your house”, the average person would probably say, “What? torpedo? tortilla? tornado? Quit chewing on a nutsack and spell it for me”
Even after spelling out T-E-P-I-L-O, the word would probably be forgotten shortly after because it doesn’t even sound English. I still find myself Google’ing, “Sarah Beeny Tep” to find the site because I find it hard to remember “Tepilo”. Fortunately, trusty Google does the hard work for me and pulls up the correct site.
Websites like “Rightmove” and “Gumtree” are easy to remember because they’re a combination of two every day words that EVERYONE uses – “RIGHT” and “MOVE”. Anyways, the branding decision for Teplilo always urked me. In my opinion, the name Tepilo is their Achilles heal. If not, it’s at least a sweaty boil on the forehead, acting as a repellent.
Poor userability and design
I wasn’t really a fan of the design. Seems overcomplicated and too “quirky” – there are too many buttons and sliding windows everywhere.
Adding a property was tedious, there were just way too many boxes and options to fill in. As a landlord, I just want to get my property listed quickly and easily. No fuss, no drama.
Finally, users have to register to send an enquiry. Urgh. That’s disgusting! Talk about killing enquiries with a sledge hammer.
Anyways, I won’t dwell on it too much, so I’m going to promptly wrap this shizzle up and get on with my day.
I wont be using Tortilla again
Unless Torpedo do something dramatic to beef up lead generation I probably won’t bother using their platform again. At least, not for trying to fill a vacant rental property. I’ll be sticking to Gumtree and a website that can get my property across platforms like Rightmove.
Has anyone tried Teplio?
If you’ve tried teplio, did you have any success? Let me know your experience, people!
Tears on my pillow
Writing this disappointing review actually hurt because I’m a huge Sarah Beeny fan. I currently have mascara running down my cheeks, and I think a part of me just died. However, I hope Beeny can forgive me. I hope she understands that vacant properties cost landlords money, so relying on Torpedo alone to find tenants could be a ditremental move.
I’d just like to clarify, just because Tortilla didn’t work for me, it’s not to say it won’t work for anyone else.
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5 Comments - join the conversation...
Jools
PS - who won the Sarah Beeney breast spotting compeTITion?
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No one managed to guess right. It was a tough one :)
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Keep up the blog!
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Many thanks, much appreciated!!
I'm not a full-time landlord! I only do it part time, I still hold down a full-time job.
I was never involved in the property industry before becoming a landlord 4-5 years ago! I'm not really involved in it now, I just write about my landlord experiences, nothing much else!
Thanks once again!
Regards
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I initially started this website because I wanted to document my every step from property idiot to property landlord,
in hope that people would find my site and help me along the way. I literally didn't have a clue about being a landlord
when I started this website.
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