I'm struggling to fill my HMO Rooms #R2Rshortandsweet #19

Are you struggling to fill your HMO rooms?
Take a step back and let us help you find the problems and solutions to get your rooms filled.

Hello, hello, hello, it's Stephanie here with another rent to rent short and sweet video and blog series.

This is a really important short and sweet this week - we’re looking at a question from Sean who is struggling to fill his HMO rooms. Sean is managing 2 five bed HMOs and half of the rooms are empty and this is what Sean asked…

"Hi Stephanie. I hope you're well. I was wondering if you can give me some advice please. I'm struggling to fill our rooms, so I wonder if you had any tips for me. Anything that can help would be highly appreciated."

I’m going to take you through my six-step system – P.O.E.T.R.Y.

But before I dive into that, I wanted to talk to you about the mindset, because what happens when you can't fill your rooms, you start to get worried and desperate, and then don’t take the right actions.

You just need to take a step back because whatever the issue is, you will be able to fix it - any room can be sold, it's just a case of getting the right product at the right price and matching the two up.

And we can absolutely do that, but we just need to find out what the problem is and why the rooms aren’t filling.

Is your room on SpareRoom?

Firstly, you need to ensure your room is on SpareRoom.

Once you’re on SpareRoom, if you look underneath your ad there is a section called ‘stats’ - click on it and it will show you how many people are clicking through to your ad.

Is it showing a lot of people clicking through to the ad, but not many people are calling you or is it hardly anyone is clicking through to the ad?

This flags up two different things:

If the number of people clicking through to your ad is low, there is something wrong with your main image and/or price – something about those things is not making them want to click through and look at your ads.
So, you need to fix your main image or your price or possibly both.
If you’ve had lots of people clicking onto your ad but you’re not receiving many calls - then it could be some of your photos and description aren’t working. The issue is not the price because they saw the price first and were happy to continue to click on the ad.
So, it's the photos and the description that you need to look at to understand why they didn't want to go further.

Are you getting viewings but no results?

If you're getting lots of viewings but people aren't going further, it tells you that the price is right and the ad was right as it attracted them to book a viewing – so there's something wrong when they come to view the house.

You need to find out what that is honestly from people, so what I encourage you to do is when people say they don't want to move forward with the room – you need to ask them for the reasons why.

You can explain that you’re new to this and would really appreciate any feedback. And just ask them to be totally honest and then listen to what they tell you and that’s how you can find out.

Here are my six steps to fill rooms – which I call P.O.E.T.R.Y

I now want to share with you the six steps to fill the rooms – which I call POETRY.

You need to firstly know that you can do it - you just need to adjust certain things because something's not working and then you will be able to fill those rooms.

P is for Photos

Your photos have to be really good to encourage people to look at your ad and you'll know whether your photos are working by whether people are clicking on your ads.

If people are not clicking on your ad, your photos are not good enough. If people are not calling for a viewing, your photos are not good enough.

You can take the photos yourself or you can get a professional photographer to take them – which is what we do.

But if money is tight you can do it yourself using these handy tips:

Good Lighting - do it in daytime hours and put the lights on in the house.
Dress the house - make sure the house is clean and tidy
Angle of photos - take them horizontal and be aware of composition. You should take the photos at waist height which gives you a really lovely view of the room.
You can take it from different levels, but waist height really works well for bedrooms because people can see themselves standing in the room. It's not too high and it's not too low.
Select the right rooms - don't take photos of things that don't look good. I see people with really awful bathrooms, and they put the picture on the ads.
You don’t need to add a photo of every room, but I recommend you have a photo of the bedroom, kitchen, lounge and maybe bathroom - but only if you can get a good shot.

O is for Online

You need to be online.

SpareRoom - there are different levels of membership with SpareRoom, you can go for pay-per-click or you can go for a bold membership. I would advise as a minimum, the bold membership.

OpenRent – This works well in some areas (we use it in ours). When you're on OpenRent, you must upgrade to Rightmove and Zoopla otherwise it's not worth using OpenRent.

Facebook – This can work really well. When we tried it in the past, we found we weren't getting the right type of tenant and it is area dependent.

We're back on Facebook again now, and Mark, one of our rent 2 rent Kickstarter's found that in his area there were lots of people who had moved into the area from other countries - in particular Eastern Europe.

They didn’t speak very good English and they didn’t have the financial history in this country - which makes it hard for them to find accommodation.

Mark went into some existing groups on Facebook where people had moved here and were looking for accommodation. And by using Google translate, you can put your ads up or maybe a friend who speaks that language will help you.

It’s been a really great source to find tenants for him. And it's a win-win because they're getting a great place to live and he's getting great tenants.

Something that surprisingly few people do is to make sure you post on your own personal profile because if you've got lovely rooms available for rent and they’re not shifting, your friends and family can help share your ad in the local area.

Do they even know that you're a landlord?

You can do the same on LinkedIn or other social media platforms you use – just let everybody know about what you're doing and what you’re offering.

E is for Existing Tenants

You know where your existing tenants have come from, so that gives you an indication of where you should be talking about these properties.

Do your existing tenants know anybody who's looking for somewhere to live? You could also offer your existing tenants an incentive of £25 or £50 for example - whatever works for you.

Your tenants want to share with people that they like and often you don't need to incentivise them, but we do occasionally. We will put a notice out to our existing tenants because you (and them) want to find like-minded people for the house shares – so that can work really well.

T is for Tell Everyone

I’ve just touched on this from the online side of telling everyone but tell everyone in person too - in your local area, at your children's school, while you're out walking the dog.

You don't know who might know somebody looking for a room to rent. I'm often surprised that we've had many properties come to us for management just out of casual conversations with local people.

So, tell everyone, don't keep it to yourself about what you're doing - make sure everybody knows about it.

R is for Rooms Beautiful

Dress your rooms and make sure your rooms look gorgeous. I really think it is worth the extra effort of getting a duvet in its cover and dressing your beds up - it makes such a difference.

I've recorded another video about dressing rooms where you can see the before and after photos.

It's worth spending the time to dress your rooms, it really pays dividends in terms of getting them to shift quickly because people can see themselves living there.

Y is for Your Viewings

How you organise your viewings is important as well. We've tried all sorts of different ways of doing it and we found 15-minute intervals works best.

Luke, our Property Assistant does the viewings and so we wanted to keep them within office hours and make it manageable for him.

What we found was the magic time is 4:00pm, if you suggest a time and a date people find it easier to say yes or no to a specific time and date rather than just saying, when are you free?

Then you would organise your next few viewings around that time so they're all together.

That does a number of things:

It blocks the viewings in so you might go two or three nights a week depending on the volume of viewings you've got at any particular time or how many rooms you have available
We found most people can make 4:00pm – most of our tenants work full time
The 15-minute intervals mean that potential tenants can see each other coming and going – this creates that sense of competition and creates that demand and desire.

So, they are my POETRY Six Steps to filling HMO rooms

P – Photos: Make sure they are amazing quality

O – Online Presence: Being proactive on SpareRoom, OpenRent, Facebook, including your own profile

E – Existing Tenants: Asking current tenants and give incentives if needed

T – Tell Everyone: Speak to everyone you meet, online and in person

R – Rooms Beautiful: Dress the bedrooms to help sell the room

Y – Your Viewings: Ensure you organise your viewings properly in 15-minute intervals

A bonus note from me

Remember this is just another little problem for you to solve. It will be okay. You will sell your rooms.

Anything will sell – you just need the right products and the right price.

To find out what the problems are, check either your property or/and your advertising, fix it and you will fill your rooms.

I hope that’s been a helpful takeaway for you, and as always, let me know your thoughts or questions if you have any.

Good luck and all the best,

Stephanie & Nicky

xx

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