Let Your HMO Rooms When SpareRoom Isn't Working - Ask The Angels 6 — Rent 2 Rent Success

If Spareroom isn’t working and you’re struggling with empty rooms in your HMO
This post is for you. We also cover online property management systems and cleaning for HMOs.

Hello, hello, hello!
This is an Ask the Angels post where I answer your rent 2 rent questions.

Today’s question is relevant for anyone who manages HMOs whether you own them or manage them.

The question that we've had from Delita is all about filling your rooms when Sparerooms isn’t working.

This can be a challenge for some HMO investors because when you've got rooms empty, you can sometimes be making a loss.

Here’s Delita’s question…

"In September, while we were getting the house HMO ready and decorating, we had lots of interest. And now that the house is ready there is no interest in the rooms. What would you suggest?”

Now, I'm just going to give the top ways to fill your rooms when Spareroom's not working.

Rent free period

First of all, if you’re doing rent to rent, have a rent free period at the beginning so you don't have to pay the rent straight away. Do ask! Most owners agree to this because if they were renting with a traditional letting agent, they wouldn’t be paid until the property was filled.

And also after the rent-free period they will be paid every single month until the end of the contract!

How to up your Spareroom game!

Your customers are on Spareroom.

There are other paths for potential tenants that you can build up in the longer-term. In the short-term though, when you want to fill your rooms quickly Spareroom is it!

In short, you have to up your Spareroom game.
Your people are on there looking for rooms, you just got to make sure that yours is going to be attractive to them.

1 Photos

The number one thing really to up your game on there, is to make sure that you've got the right photos.

Basically, get your rooms looking ship shape and get some professional photos. We do that as that small investment will stand you in good stead each time you’re re-letting a room in the property.

And they’ll become part of the ‘before and after’ portfolio you show agents and landlords in the future or in case studies you add to your website.

If you're on a tight budget, do the photos yourself. There are lots of tips online for how to do property photographs, but one of the key ones is just to get the composition right.

First of all, make sure that you take the photos in bright daylight, because you're going to get the room looking really good then.
Switch all the lights on as well.

Before clicking the button, make sure that you're giving a good representation of the room.

Another tip is to go down to sort of bed height, kneel down and just get a really good composition so you're not sort of looking down on the room, you've sort of got it at a good angle. If all that is beyond you, yeah, I would definitely say get a professional then, because they’re going to be very valueable to you.

2 Wow words

Secondly check your words have enough wow.

It’s good to remember here we're not just selling a room, we're selling a lifestyle, a lovely life in a lovely property that's going to be their home.
Tell them about what they'll be able to do when they're there
What's nearby?
What are the features of your property that's going to make it really relaxing? Maybe it's got a massive living room or maybe the bedroom's really big or the other housemates are very friendly.
Check that you're really selling a wonderful experience and not just a room.

3 Be Proactive

You gotta be ‘on it like a car bonnet’!
Be proactive in contacting people who are looking in your area and asking them if they’d like to view your property (with the now beautiful photos).

Take notice of what they say in their ad about who they are and what they're looking for. For example, if they tell you where they're going to work, mention that in your reply, because the more personal you seem, the more interest you personally take in them, the more likely they are to want to live with you and continue to have a relationship with you.

For ease, create some email templates so that you're not having to think up what to write every single time. You can just paste in the template and then update it so that it speaks to that individual person.

4 Listen up and show you care

Your issue has been that people aren’t contacting you on Spare Room but once you make the changes above people will contact you on Spareroom.

Once you start viewings again, really listen to what your viewers say.

A great question to ask people is ‘why are you moving?’
When you ask people why they're moving, it's a very open question, and they often tell you a lot about who they are and what they want. Maybe they've got a new job or they have started a relationship and they wanted to move closer or their existing landlord is selling.

Whatever the reason.
Listen. Ask followups.

While they tell you why they’re moving they may also tell you what they’re looking for. For example, they may want somewhere closer to work, with quieter housemates, cleaner.

Whatever they say, helps you to show how your property would be a gorgeous home for them and how it meets their specific needs. You need to show that you care and that you deliver exceptional service.

You don't say, ‘we give exceptional service’ you just demonstrate that you care about them and about the property.

For example, if a viewer mentions that she wants somewhere cleaner than her current place you’d empathise with her about living in a dirty place and talk about your cleaning service and your online app and short response times for maintenance. That helps people see what it’d be like to live with you.

5 Start before you’re ready

I think the other things you already know is that really, start showing it before it's complete, because if your rooms are nearly there, even if you've still got a few bits and pieces to do, it works. We've in the past shown rooms that are absolute building sites, because we just show them the after pictures from other properties and say, "Well, at the moment it's a building site, but you can see broadly what the space looks like and it's going to look like this." People do take it on trust as well.

If it’s your first property.
Get the best room done first and you can start showing that.
Or at least start booking the viewings in.
People love the idea of moving into a newly refurbished home.

6 Other platforms

I said Spareroom is the biggest and best because it is.

It’s useful though to also try the other online platforms and see if they work in your area.

OpenRent is a fantastic platform that we sometimes use as well.
OpenRent puts your property onto rightmove.
When you use Open Rent, you must use the upgrade so that your property is listed on rightmove etc. Currently £29.

People have had mixed results.
Some people find that it works really well for them, other people find it doesn’t.
I think if you're in this stage where you're struggling, definitely, it's a great time to get yourself on OpenRent and rightmove and see if it works for you.

Facebook works for some people too.
Definitely worth a try.

The other thing you can do is, you can contact local large employers to let them know about your property. This tends to be more of a longer-term thing, because you've got to get to know people and have a relationship where they can start sending people to you regularly.

Summary

For the short- term things,
Optimise Spare Room

Photos
Words
Be Proactive
Show you care
Start before you’re ready
Try other platforms

Then, in the longer term, you can look at going into corporates, speaking to companies so you've got other ways to fill your room apart from relying on Spareroom and OpenRent.

Next up Andy asked about property management platforms…

"I was curious to know who on here uses Arthur to manage their R2R properties (or all propoerties for that matter!)?
How key/essential has it been to allow you to become a truly hands-free investor/manager and have a genuinely passive income?
Or, if you have a good letting agent to manage your R2R deals, do you even need to use a programme like Arthur?
I'm slowly trying to build ideas on resources and programmes that are available to systemise as early as possible so it would be great to get some reviews from people who use it.
Thanks"

Online Property Management Systems for HMOs

It's a fantastic question.
I believe it’s absolutely fundamental to have an online property management system so that you can oversee other people's management of your properties.
Now, in the case of rent to rent, I'm sceptical, as you know, about using an agent to manage the rent to rent.

But, leaving that aside, whoever's managing your properties for you, whether it's you or an agent, having an online platform gives you more scope to bring in a Property Manager in the future.

Let me paint the picture for you and give you a scenario of what often happens.

You've got your HMOs.
You've refurbed them.
You've got your spreadsheets of maybe names and rents coming in, or maybe you're not recording everything fully all in one place.
Perhaps you've got your referencing information attached to emails scattered in different inboxes and some information on your hard drive over here and other bits in the cloud over there.
Then maybe you've got your electric certificates and they're not online, they're offline because you were given a hardcopy.

If you then decide you want to outsource, you've got a problem because you've got information all over the place.
Maybe some of it you haven't recorded formally because you're doing a full-time job as well as this or you're running other businesses or what have you.
Then you make you life very difficult.
And it’s difficult to outsource.

But, if you have an online property management system, then all of your property management and tenant management information is in one place.
And that is super important, even if you always self manage.
It's useful for so many things, and especially because there are so many legal obligations on us as landlords.
If your recording systems are not auditable, you're vulnerable if a tenant wants to maliciously say that they haven't been given information or anything like that and an online property and tenant management system gives you that evidence.

For anyone with more than one or two properties it’s essential.
For me, even at one or two HMOs I would still prefer to have that online property management system because if I go on holiday or when I travel the world for three months or whatever, I can just pass that system to somebody else to work it for me while I'm away, and also, if I so wish, because you know, I'm slightly obsessive, if I want to go online and look at what's happening while I'm away, I can go in and I can oversee what anyone's doing for me.

The other thing is, I believe that the best way forward, if you want to build a larger HMO portfolio, is to have your own team to manage it for you.
Now, that own team could be full-time staff, but it could be a virtual assistant. We had a virtual assistant when we first started, and that was amazing before we brought in our full-time office-based team member, Luke.

Imagine the simplicity of onboarding a new team member and the ease of saying

’Right, this is what you do. I want you to log in here and there's a process video here.’ And the property management system provide the online and video training that you can use to train your staff. It's brilliant.

Much easier than saying.
’Try and make head or tail of my various email inboxes and the contents of a kitchen drawer’!

We do use Arthur, because when we started, Arthur was available.
What we love about it is, apart from making outsourcing much easier, is all the information's in one place. There's a part of it where all of the property documents go in and we can access them all the tenants can access them. There's a part where all the tenant documents go in, and we can access and the single tenant can see the docs that belong to them. It's totally auditable. It links up to Xero, and all the messaging both ways is in there.

The one we recommend wasn’t around when we started and is called Go Tenant.

It has all the perks of Arthur and is easier to use.
Use our link to get some units free!

Click here for a free trial to Go Tenant

Cleaning for HMOs

Next up, it's cleaners. This is a good question, Connor has asked…

"Just wondering how many HMO R2Rs based in Birmingham are offering a cleaning service in their monthly budget with their tenants.
If so, who do you use?
How much is the average going rate?"

Well, I think this one will probably vary all across the country. We are we are in Newport in Wales, we pay £12 an hour for our cleaners.

We use a small cleaning company, they’re great and we've got a checklist, so they do lots of other things too.

One of the perks is, they keep an eye on the property and let us know if there's any problems, such as maintenance issues, or fake tan issues! As well as cleaning. They're a great resource. They keep the properties up to scratch. I think the tenants really love it that we've got the cleaners going in.

It can be difficult to find a really good cleaning team who're going to keep things up to your level.

We have some people saying that they are fine without the cleaners, but, it's just a fact, isn't it, that properties go downhill if nobody's cleaning them, and it might not make any difference over a month, but over a year, over two years, over three years your property's going to go downhill if you don't have a regular cleaning team going in.

And I don't think you can rely on individuals within a house share to clean your property to the standard that's required to make sure that you can let out the rooms really easily on a consistent basis, which you need for any HMO investment, but especially for rent to rent.

Those are the questions for today.

If you have a question you’d like me to answer, please comment below.

Bye for now. See you soon.

Stephanie & Nicky
xx

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