Are you desperately seeking landlords?
It might not have been an officially sanctioned piece of marketing material, but somebody, somewhere in your agency has probably used the words "desperately seeking more landlords" in a piece of untargeted literature recently.
The scattergun approach to finding landlords has always been a pretty ineffective method in my book, but in the absence of a better idea, an area of rainforest the size of Milton Keynes has been turned into copier paper for agents throughout the land to door drop desperately for another landlord or three.
My distaste for this type of marketing was tempered somewhat when I saw the results of our Landlord Survey which revealed that over half of those surveyed didn't buy their property with the intention of becoming a landlord. So this gave rise to the idea that there were plenty of 'accidental' landlords out there who may indeed respond to a badly photocopied note through the door alluding to the aforementioned desperation. Indeed, when I've suggested re-investing marketing efforts in something other than "canvassing" to some agents, I've been chastised and told that it does work and they then cite at least 3 occasions in the past 3 years/30 tonnes of rainforest where their flyer was mentioned on a valuation.
But then, The Property Ombudsman decided to upset the applecart anyway with new guidance on...
"INAPPROPRIATE PRACTICES WHEN CANVASSING"
As part of the updated Code of Practice that was introduced last August, The Ombudsman stated the following:
Inappropriate practices when canvassing - to help avoid the consumer experiencing what could amount to harassment or being misled and to lessen irritation resulting from causing the consumer effort or raising expectation.
- Door knocking or cold calling at properties for sale with other agents.
- Continuous unsolicited calls, emails or general junk mail.
- Use of a ‘compliments slip’ or ‘note’ that does not explain its true purpose but merely makes a statement such as ‘contact me urgently’.
- Acting as someone who you are not or using third parties to project your business.
- Specifically targeting tenants by whatever means for details of landlords so that unsolicited approaches can be made to those landlords.
The above is open to some interpretation, but the last 3 words of bullet no.2 kind of cover most of what I'm referring to.
TEMPTING RATHER THAN TOUTING
I doubt I will tempt many agents to save the rainforest in reality, but I would like to offer one very easy, very cheap alternative for you to consider...
Zoopla have a quirky little function on their website called TemptMe. This is where the owner of any property in the UK can set a price at which they would be prepared to sell their home. Simply visit the "Current Values" section for your area and in the "Useful links for [Your Area]" on the right, you will see the link to "TemptMe" homes in your patch.
The reason I suggest this in a lettings context rather than sales is most of these TemptMe prices seem to have been drawn from Land Registry data for Cloud Cuckoo Land. There is one in my home town of Epsom where the TemptMe price is set at £1.8m, yet it was sold in 2006 for £720k and Zoopla's own automated current estimate puts it at £762k! Equally, there are some more grounded examples like this one posted on New Years Eve.
Some may just be nutters, but they've given Zoopla permission to let you tempt them. You can send them a message through the website too! Nothing unsolicited about that then.
I'm quietly confident that a tempting insight into what sort of rent could be achieved for the property at present will probably float their boat more than the harsh reality of selling it. So when you send the troops out door knocking next week, maybe tell one of them to save their weary legs and do a bit of tempting instead. Let me know how they get on...
