How to run a successful letting agency

This week we’re talking about how to run a successful letting agency. It’s something many landlords with growing portfolios think about doing, and also a potential way to get into the property industry by starting your own business.

We’ve built up an agency of our own (Yellow Lettings) over the last couple of years, and we talk about what we think are the key drivers of success – including:

• Getting qualified (the NFOPP property management qualification is the one we chose)
• Getting compliant (joining an ombudsman scheme, having the right insurance and protecting client money)
• Deciding on your USP or market niche
• Building the right systems (recommended book: The Checklist Manifesto)
• Hiring your dream team
• Knowing what to measure to track your success

We’ve put together plenty of episodes on lettings and management, so if this is something you’re interested in you should check out:

• How to prepare a property to let
• How to handle a nightmare tenant
• How to manage a property yourself
• How to let a property yourself
• How to get your property let fast
• Lettings law you need to know
• Lessons learnt from running a letting agent

Resource of the week

Thank you to Bruce for writing in about Driversnote – an app you can use to track your mileage. Just activate it for each journey, and each month it’ll send you a PDF with all your journeys broken down.

Why? So you can deduct the mileage cost against your tax, of course! Tap a couple of buttons and hand over less to HMRC? Sounds good to us.

News this week

Airbnb has come up in lots of recent conversations, with many landlords eyeing it as a way to get higher returns from an existing property.

The fly in the ointment is often mortgage lenders, who it’s fair to say aren’t keen on this model. This story from Mortgage Strategy goes into great detail about the position of the various lenders, and the options you do have if this is the route you want to go down.