How to streamline your marketing & letting process

…and save an enormous amount of time, money and resources.

Many residential real estate professionals struggle with the same challenge: the marketing and letting process takes too much time and effort, and vacancies must be filled more quickly. Luckily the digital tools of today offer solutions to these challenges.

Together with these digital tools and smart decisions, you can get to a situation where tenants come to you, instead of you going after them. 

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The common challenges in the renting process

Many factors make the rental process slow and inefficient. The main challenges in the rental process among property owners are facing:

• Slowness: from the moment a tenant gives notice to the moment the new tenant has moved in, the process takes too long.
• Laboriousness: the departure of a tenant, the practicalities involved, the search for a new tenant and onboarding require a lot of manual work.
• The cost: all the manual work done by people costs money, as well as the advertising cost related to hunting new tenants – plus every month that the apartment sits empty waiting for a new tenant.
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Solution 1: Waiting list to speed up the process

Let's start by tackling the step that consumes the most time and resources, and can cost you months of losses due to vacant rental apartments: the application process. With digital tools, automating this is easy, and takes big piles of work off the desks of many people. 

• Interested tenants can register on a property's waiting list. While their life is easier as they don’t have to keep checking possible vacancies, your life is easier, as you automatically collect a nice queue of people interested in living in your property.
• As soon as one of the current tenants has given notice, you can go to the waiting list of that property and send a pre-generated email to the first person on the waiting list, given a limited time period to react.
• If the person wants to sign a lease, you easily generate a contract on the platform and send a PDF version for signing. 
• In case the person is not interested, you pick the next person in the queue.

No more time spent advertising and receiving applications for each vacant apartment one by one. Pre-generated emails with all the necessary information automatically added make the process much more efficient.

Solution 2: Onboarding with automation & self-service

When tenants move in, they have a lot of practical things to deal with and usually a lot of questions to answer, which take time for both the tenant and the property manager. This too is simply solved with digital tools, like ours. 

Home Assistant is a smart and enriched self-service portal in the Resident App, that gives your tenant all the answers to questions they might have, 24/7.

• You pre-populate the Home Assistant database with categories of information, instructions, images and videos that the tenant might need during the onboarding phase.
• Tenants will be prompted to download the app and guided to the Home Assistant to find answers to their questions. And only in case they do not find the answer there, they can send a message or service request through the app. 

This will shape your tenant communication so that it is largely based on independent information seeking and your pre-generated emails – which in most cases will be sufficient and tenants are happy with them. Separately written 1-to-1 emails are only for matters requiring special attention. 

And with basic communication flowing smoothly, when real problems arise, you can focus on solving them as quickly as possible and providing the best possible tenant experience instead of wasting all your time on basic routines.

Solution 3: Take the Word of Mouth -marketing seriously 

Great, you have your waitlist and onboarding setup ready to save you a lot of labour, time and money. Next, you need to ensure that you always have a pool of interested tenants queuing up for vacant apartments. To get there, your property needs to be known and wanted. One way is to take word of mouth seriously.

92% of consumers around the world value and trust suggestions from their peers, friends and family much more than any advertising. And this is just one of a huge number of studies showing the power of Word of Mouth. 

Today, there's no need to go hunting for recommendations at face-to-face meetings, as it's all online – on discussion boards, Google reviews, social media channels and blogs. And what’s more:

• 46% of consumers feel that online business reviews are as trustworthy as personal recommendations from friends or family 
• 96% of unhappy customers share their bad experiences and discontent with about 9-15 other people rather than complain directly to the company. 

That's why the importance of word of mouth cannot be ignored if you want to build an attractive and reliable brand.

So how do you make sure that positive stories about your property are told, both offline and online? For example like this:

1. Take care of tenant satisfaction
2. Identify and respond to tenants' needs
3. Provide a seamless, digital service experience
4. Enable self-service
5. Make your property a welcoming community

By providing tenants with a distinctive and pleasant customer experience, by responding quickly to their needs, concerns and suggestions, you can be almost certain that they will spread good word of mouth.

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Solution 4: Create a desired and tenant-centric brand

Building a brand is long-term work, but it pays off because strong brands attract and engage consumers better. How do you transform your property into a desirable brand? The key is tenant-centricity.

• By putting tenants at the heart of your service, you're building a tenant-centric brand that makes your property a known and desired place where people want to live.
• With cohesive visuals and communication, you make your property brand alive, strong and remembered.
• A strong brand that crosses the limits of digital and physical spaces creates a sense of community and increases the value of your property.

By streamlining your marketing and letting operations, you can save huge amounts of time, money and resources. If this sounds like something your properties could benefit from, book a free demo and let’s discuss how can our solution help you to achieve better results.

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