Friday, December 30, 2011

Letting your Property? Get the Rent Right.

Did you know you can get a free rental appraisal from one of our property experts at Rental Results? Our team specialise in areas of Wellington, Hutt, and Porirua so you can get an accurate appraisal of what your property is worth.

Lots of landlords say ‘I can’t afford property management’, but they can ill afford the time to look after their property on top of everything else they do in life. The reason they can’t afford property management is that they are not getting all the rent they should from their property.

Here are some signs you are under-renting your property:

1. The phone rings hot/emails pour in when you advertise

2. You have queues of prospective tenants at the open home/showing.

3. Tenants offer to pay you more for the property.

4. The people who come to see it say ‘wow, I can’t believe how nice it is’.

5. People looking at your property are younger/not as financially established as you would have hoped.

While you could feel smug that your property is so great you are turning people away in droves, think of how much it is costing you. Ever $20 below market rent is $1,000 every year you are not getting for the property. Would you be happy to spend that much on advertising? Or accept that much rent-arrears without a second thought?

A new client told us they wanted $450pw for their Whitby property. We signed up a tenant for $530pw. That’s $4,000 extra each year! Did we just pay for ourselves? Heck yes, twice over.

If you have a vacancy coming up, ask us for a rental appraisal. You just might find that property management is effectively free for you too, or even find we are even paying you to manage your property with all the extra rent you get, just like we did for our Whitby clients.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

How good are we really?

Net Promoter Score is an accurate unit of measurement of client satisfaction. It is worked out by asking clients 'the ultimate question' and based on the responses, getting a score which could range from negative 100% to positive 100%. Members of an industry tend to score similarly to each other, and their relative rank can be worked out. For instance, the banking industry has a range from negative 30 to positive 8. Used car salesmen would rank even lower!

A property management company in Brisbane surveyed landlords and discovered an average Net Promoter Score of negative 22% for property management locally. I think it would be fair to say this would be true all over Australia, and even New Zealand. Not many people have positive things to say about property management, sadly. Incidentally, the company conducting the Brisbane survey is regarded as the best in Brisbane, and they scored negative 11%. They were horrified by that, but it is all relative. They out-performed their competition significantly.

We asked our entire database 'the ultimate question' and had a representative sample of responses come back. Our score? Positive 36%.

Wow.

That means we wipe the floor with the competition. The majority of people on our database are raving fans of what we do (please note, we had responses from people who did not use us yet either. Had we just surveyed our clients, our score would have been higher, quite likely, 42). 56% of respondents rated us 9 or even 10 out of a possible ten.

What is 'the ultimate question'? No, the answer isn't the meaning of life, the universe and everything. It is simply "On a scale of one to ten, ten being the highest, how likely are you to recommend Rental Results to family and friends?".

So you can see why people from all over the planet (and soon, the Galaxy), like having Rental Results manage their property in the Wellington Region.