PROPERTY STRATEGY BLOG

PART 5 of 7: TEAM - DAY-to-DAY RUNNING

Day-to-day management of the lettings department of your property business.

When you are about to take over your lettings, you need to think about what the day-to-day requirements are going to be and what staff you’ll need to execute this as well as possible.

 To start with, these are the areas you should be considering:

 1.     On the ground team

This will be people you use for viewings, maintenance staff.  In the short term, you could also consider using something like Viewber if you currently don’t have staff that would be able to conduct viewings for you.

2.     Virtual staff

Anything like referencing, AST signing etc. can be done from anywhere, we do all of this online. 

3.     Out of hours calls:

There are a few approaches you can take on this...

- Provide tenants a triage list for out of hours emergencies (i.e. numbers for the waterboard, gas board, advise to call 999 for fire etc.)

- Call answering service: if you don’t have enough team members to be able to pick up calls at the weekend, consider using a service like All Day PA and provide them with a list of your go-to engineers and maintenance team.  We’d also suggest you ask them to take tenants through a triage check list first e.g. is the gas meter topped up?

We have found that the first option has been working well for us and in fact we have only had one emergency that has needed to be dealt with over a weekend since last July.  We do however have a team member that is on-call over the weekend just in case there is an issue.

What has really helped us with managing this is setting up really clear expectations for our tenants with our office hours, emergency numbers, instructions on what to check first before reporting something.  Our system, Arthur, also enables tenants to report problems through the app and they are prompted with questions before the job will be assigned to us.

So what is the best approach to ensuring you have the right team to execute all of this?  Watch out for the next post!

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