Lettings Life – December 2020
The last few weeks have certainly been busy!
Interest in rooms picked up recently, for another surge in demand. During one 10 day period, we had 12 rooms sold, with many of the tenants moving in within 24-28 hours of viewing! It does mean that things often get manic when this happens and the admin goes through the roof! But it’s great getting the rooms filled and providing new tenants with somewhere to call home. Since the start of November, we’ve been able to start offering a welcome gift to our new tenants, too, and when our first set of boxes arrived, our team were all really impressed with the contents!
Over the past couple of months we have seen an more increased desire for online viewings and to cater for this, we have tried to ensure we have videos in stock so that we can send them out quickly. We have a mixture of videos that include both commentary and no commentary, as we find that the videos are also useful for other platforms and one of our lettings team is less keen to hear themselves talking! We appreciate that videos are not quite as good as the reality of being inside a property/room, to get a feel for the size and space, but it does go a long way. And especially for those unable to attend an in-person viewing, for whatever reason, videos offer the best sense of what the property offers.
Among some of the other jobs we have been doing, we have created Covid-specific information posters for our tenants. It took some time between the content, to design, to printing, to framing and to installation, but we’re really happy with them and have received positive feedback from tenants.
Maintenance is one of those parts of lettings that our sales team never really have much to do with, but that being said, if often becomes something they deal with due to the need to know whether rooms are ready, jobs have been completed and whether parts have arrived! Most recently, we had a situation where an incorrectly cut key was discovered for a new room. With all the many aspects of a new HMO to check, this one key of a set for this particular room had managed to slip through the net! However, a quick message and a trip to HQ and we picked up a spare, so the problem was solved fairly swiftly! Phew!
