The
majority of letting agents don’t get it .....landlord farming. You see, the popular,
obvious, guaranteed ideas to get landlords have definitely been taken, or are
so small that they're not really worth your blood, sweat and tears.
But I am
quite glad if I am being honest. If was instantly understood by all, it was so
generic or descriptive then there would be a problem. If the technique did
something so predictable that everyone was sure it's going to work, then it
would have been thought of before by one of the big corporate’s. If the
technique was so easy, then every last 14,000 thousand letting agency offices
up and down the UK would do it straight away, especially those 3000 corporate
agents.
So why
haven’t the corporate’s taken it up? Because it’s difficult. Their marketing
departments come up with the same old glup machine adverts that they have since
Adam was a lad... ‘Landlords Wanted’ adverts .... ‘Trust ***** with your rental
property’ ... ‘We are are sooooo brill at letting how-sezes’ .. you know the
stuff. The problem with landlord farming
is that it takes lots of creative thinking, plenty of time and shed loads of patience.
It works because it makes you the local expert of your local property market
and landlords like to deal with letting agents who know what they are talking
about and can trust .. so why isn’t everyone jumping on this?
It’s funny because so many letting agents are afraid of being average, yet they settle for the easy way out. They take what is in front of them and opt to do the least amount to achieve the bare minimum to hit their targets. In short, letting agents are afraid of challenges, they have lost their courage and don’t know how well they will deal with failure, so they step away and take the easiest route.
It really comes down to this ... and I am guilty of this as much as the next bloke .... we love to do, what we love to do. We shun what we hate, even if these hated tasks toughen us, we avoid them. We do what we love first, give those jobs we love the most attention, and postpone and always find something else to do when it comes to the things that trouble us. We don’t like them, so we give them less importance.
But isn’t this how a child thinks? (Hurts me saying that .. it’s supposed to) What 90% of letting agents currently lack in this world is mental sturdiness. With no mental sturdiness you begin to have a mindset of weakness, laziness and entitlement. By no means am I perfect, look at the size of me, I am 18 stone plus and should be losing weight ... I fall victim to this same thing — but this isn’t a weight loss blog, it’s a how to get more landlords to use your lettings agency .. Lettings is not meant to be easy and it is tough. Why do you think there are so many more pedestrian lettings agents compared to the cream of the crop lettings agents who have made something out of their business and lives? What it has come down to is their mental sturdiness.
In a previous job, I could see many letting agents treading water with their business. Surely if you have been in business for 5 to 10 years and your lettings agency hasn’t grown in the last couple of years, surely if you carry on, new agents will come and nibble away at your business. You can either keep treading water of do something to get more landlords for your lettings agency
So, do you have the time, patience, creative thinking and foresight to try landlord farming ... plenty of other agents have started the journey don’t you think you owe it to yourself?