When marketing your rental flats (or houses), NEVER underestimate the power of word of mouth to your own personal grapevine.
You tell 10 friends and family that you have a rental flat or house coming empty – odds are each of these people will know enough about 30-100 or so people to know whether they are looking for somewhere to rent. Therefore, with just a few casual conversations, the 10 people you tell becomes 300-1000 people!!
Whilst renting out own Ipswich rental flats, we have often suceeded in renting them (at a time when letting agents were drawing a blank) by telling colleagues, friends, family and even a few casual acquaintances.
Example 1: a lady I worked with in Ipswich was getting divorced; she didn’t need rental accommodation but her ex-husband viewed our flat and five years later he is still a good tenant.
Example 2: a man I worked with on an occasional basis had a trial separation from his wife; he rented a rental house of ours before moving into a penthouse flat when we sold the house.
Example 3: another colleague had a sister who needed t0 rent a flat; the sister stayed in our flat for about a year.
Example 4: my son had a friend who needed to rent a flat; on a different occasion, the same son had a colleague who was looking to rent.
Example 5: we recently had two properties to let in Ipswich – these properties had been on the books of one Ipswich letting agent for a month and we had just given them to a second letting agent. We asked a friend if she wanted to rent one house – she wasn’t ready for moving at that point but phoned back later that evening to say a friend of hers had just split with her partner and could she rent it. We spoke to the neighbours of the other Ipswich house and asked him to keep an eye on the empty property and he said that a lady at his church was looking for a house to rent in Ipswich and could she rent it?
In all of the above situations, renting via word of mouth not only secured a tenant quicker than would have happened had we trusted solely to a letting agent but also meant that we did not have the – significant – cost of letting agent’s fees.
Rent Flats and Houses Blog 