Monday, April 16, 2012
Is your gut feeling just indigestion?
Are you relying on gut instinct or do you know your
market well - Landlord Survey
In professional sports, coaches and players rely heavily on
accurate, up-to-date information to ensure they are one step ahead
of the competition. They rely less on their gut feeling to make
important decisions and more on up-to-date, accurate information
from a reliable source.
In rugby, timely information is relayed to the England coaching
staff, football teams use Prozone and Opta, to get similar insights
and in Rowing, coaches and athletes alike use the Peach system to
quantify improvements in their technique.
In business however, all too often we rely on our gut instinct
when it comes to strategy and reacting to market conditions, rather
than turning to a reliable source of information.
This is the reason why the Property Academy research tools were
developed - surveys dedicated to the residential property market
designed to deliver key insights to property professionals and give
them the edge in their local market.
It is about the choices that the people who keep a letting agent
in business are making: the landlords and tenants. How did they
find you? Why did they choose you? How loyal are they and what
do they think to the services you provide?
To illustrate this, consider the issue of having a high street
office. In recent years we have heard a lot about the imminent
death of the high street agent.
The 2001 Landlord Survey asked 1,500 landlords what influenced
their choice of agent? The most popular answer was office location.
A whopping 83.3% of respondents to the latest survey said that
office location influenced which agents were invited to provide a
rental appraisal. It did not matter if the landlord himself
was 4 or 40 miles from the property, they wanted an
agent with a local office.
In this same question, the range of services that an agent
offered was also of paramount importance, along with membership of
a professional body.
Would these have been the reasons that your gut told you? Maybe
as you read this, your gut is telling you it isn't true. Having
heard feedback from over 1,500 landlords, agents have been using
this knowledge, along with feedback in many other areas, to give
themselves the edge during the past 12 months
This is just one of the many insights from the 2011 Landlord
Survey which both challenged and, in some cases, confirmed many
long-held beliefs about what landlords want from agents and data is
now being gathered as part of the 2012 research.
To find out what really matters to landlords in 2012, you can
receive further information by contacting ben@estateagencyevents.com
On 25 May 2012, the results of the 2012 survey will be
revealed to all in attendance at the 2012 Lettings LIVE event.
Melanie Bien will presenting the results along with comment from
some of the UK's leading letting agents alongside presentations
from Darren Shirlaw, and four-time Olympic Gold Medal winner
Matthew Pinsent. To book tickets please visit www.estateagencyevents.com