92% of tenant searches start
online. It’s astonishing how quickly internet
searches have come to dominate the lettings industry.
Online advertising is no longer a luxury. It’s
no longer an add-on from your favourite high street
lettings agent. It’s the future of lettings
and the best way to find a tenant. But right now,
internet property search is incredibly fragmented
with some huge portals dominating the space, and literally
hundreds of smaller sites specialising in niches based
on locality or type of let, e.g. student lets or house
shares.
What the internet offers landlords
above anything is the ability to access tenants who
want the property they’re offering, without
the requirement to contract with a lettings agent
month in, month out. The cost savings are obvious.
But equally, the whole internet sphere can look amazingly
daunting – if you’re used to just handing
the keys over to an agent and leaving them to get
on with it, where do you start?
Firstly, there are the “big
four” lettings sites – Rightmove, Zoopla,
FindaProperty and Prime Location. Traditionally, these
are the domain of the high street agent, as they don’t
deal directly with private landlords. Online lettings
agents like Upad can help here – we access these
sites for you and advertise your property on them
without requiring an ongoing management contract.
Are these sites enough? Their
traffic is enormous – but results are surprising,
as we find they supply only a third of our tenant
enquiries. Around 100 medium-sized sites provide another
third. If you’re lucky, a traditional high street
lettings agent will list your property on these, and
if you’re not, they’ll have restricted
themselves to the “big four”.
Either way, they probably won’t
be bothering with the 400 smallest sites that still
provide the final third of our tenant enquiries. Though
many agents don’t bother listing on these sites,
you actually miss out on a huge number of enquiries
if you don’t list on them. But in practice,
nobody’s ever going to spend their time entering
their details one by one into hundreds of tiny sites
– and that’s again where Upad can help.
You only need to add the details
of your property once; our technology then distributes
them for you across more than 500 different websites,
so reaching tenants wherever they’re looking
becomes effortless for landlords. Our one-off fee
of £59 covers all your listings, so maximising
your exposure doesn’t cost anything extra: visit
www.upad.co.uk to get started.
So
far, that’s the traditional view of landlords
and the internet – it’s all about the
advertising. And if that’s the end of your interest,
then fair enough. But some landlords have taken things
much further, using the internet to promote their
portfolios and to network with other property professionals.
